Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he'll explore where our industry is and where it's going -- on both micro and macro levels -- with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

As the year comes to a close, it seems appropriate to cast my vote for the best (and some of the worst) gadgets I've seen. These are my personal choices for products that I felt were best of breed and really managed to differentiate themselves (or didn't at all). In no particular order, here are my picks and pans.

Best Phones: This was a tricky category, and I'm not breaking it down into different segments. This is just the best on the market in my opinion -- no matter how smart it was considered to be, or how well it did in school.

• iPhone 3GS. It was a simple choice. Take the coolest phones on the market, bump up the memory and make it twice as fast. Add in some new features like a digital compass and toss in an ecosystem of 100,000+ apps. Sure, it's still locked to AT&T but the iPhone is still the phone that many others aspire to be.
• Palm Pre. At this point last year many had written Palm off entirely. Instead of fading away, Palm came back on strong with webOS, a new way of integrating diverse content called Synergy and two devices launched across the globe. Along the way, the Pre garnered much mindshare from consumers, and Palm showed that you don't need to clone the iPhone to drive the state of the art forward.
• HTC HD2. When Microsoft released Windows Mobile 6.5, there was a chorus of groans about more of the same. HTC took up the challenge and proved that there was more to Windows Mobile than slow devices and resistive screens. The HD2 takes Windows Mobile to places never seen before with a capacitive touch screen, a Snapdragon processor and HTC-created extensions that make multi-touch work the HD2's gorgeous 4.3-inch display. Wrap it all up in HTC's Sense UI and you've got the best Windows Mobile device on the market today.

Continue reading Entelligence: Gartenberg's best of 2009 in personal tech

Entelligence: Gartenberg's best of 2009 in personal tech originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now I want you to close your eyes and squint really hard. Because I'm going to tell you about a time that feels ancient, a time when Sony made some of the baddest laptops around.

Way before the internet made the idea plausible, Sony was ripping optical drives out of laptops to make them as portable as possible. One such computer, the $1,500 Sony VAIO PCG-SRX99 (circa 2001), weighed just 27.6lbs and made do with a 10-inch screen.

Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.

(I'd mention that it ran XP, but that part is a bit too familiar for nostalgic comfort.)

Today, the closest analog to the PCG-SRX99 is a netbook. For about $300 and a weight just shy of 3lbs, you can score a system that, from the outside, is remarkably similar. And on the inside, its clock speed has about doubled, plus there's anywhere between 4x and 8x the amount of RAM and storage.

But if you were willing to look a bit beyond skin deep, I'd argue that the contemporary smartphone is more similar to the PCG-SRX99 than the netbooks of today. Take the iPhone 3GS. In terms of sheer tech specs, it's pretty much a midrange smartphone...and it's about identical to our retro Vaio.

The 3GS has a 600MHz processor and an identical amount of RAM to the PCG-SRX99—256MB. And it holds anywhere from 16 to 32GB in flash storage. Amenities like Wi-Fi (faster 802.11g). Turn to a company like HTC, and you can double the RAM while including a processor as fast as 1GHz.

Still, while Sony's Vaio PCG-SRX99 couldn't fit in our pocket, we've championed its form in an entire wave of cheap, portable computers today. Oh, and that whole ditching the optical drive idea? Sony spotted that trend a mile away. [Product Page and Review]