The Top Five Electronics Products of the Decade

Dec 28, 2009 2:40 PM

Top 5 electronics products of the decade

Photo: iPod Nano courtesy of Apple. The Nook
e-book reader courtesy of Barnes & Noble.

These are the electronic devices that arguably created the most revolutionary changes for consumers over the past ten years. All came to prominence during the ‘00s and were transformative—they added important new capabilities that in some way changed the way we live. There's no particular significance to the ordering:

The smartphone. A decade ago, cell phones were functionally much like the landline phones we used at home: We used them simply to talk to people. The first true smartphones showed how much more a cell phone could do. Borrowing its killer app from computers, the Blackberry allowed our e-mail to follow us everywhere, and helped lay the groundwork for social networking. With its superb touchscreen and robust, flexible operating system, the iPhone provided the launch pad for the apps revolution, which suggests there’s almost nothing a handheld device won’t eventually be able to do.

The iPod. Launched in 2001, Apple’s portable music player wasn't the first offering that prompted millions to digitize their music; that was Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that launched in 1999. Nor was it the first MP3 player. But as the center of an integrated digital-music ecology, the iPod made digital music manageable for the masses. Buying music (at the iTunes Store), managing it (with iTunes software), and loading it onto an iPod MP3 player was never so easy or so elegant. It still isn’t; nearly a decade later, iTunes and iPods still lead the field.

The e-book reader. Even the best of these digital reading devices, such as the Amazon Kindle, still have issues, nearly a decade after we first tested them. (That initial report included asking author Toni Morrison to use them and offer impressions.) But e-readers are poised to do more than acquire color and better contrast. They’ll eventually create some hybrid of the printed page and the Internet page, perhaps by morphing into a very different form factor—like the tablet computer.

The GPS navigator. This, too, may not last the next decade in anything like its current form. That’s because what portable GPS devices pioneered, the ability to know precisely where your car is, will soon be on virtually every mobile device. A host of smartphone apps are already showing us how many new, and useful (mostly!), ways that data can be put to use.

The wireless router. The rise of the affordable laptop computer—which cost about $2,000 at the end of the 1990s—was an important electronics evolution. But what made the laptop transformative was Wi-Fi access. Launched in 2003, home routers using the 802.11g wireless protocol untethered the home computer, and paved the way for the likes of entire public parks in which people surf the Web freely.

Our colleagues at the Home and Garden blog have created their own rundown of the top 10 products of the decade. Meantime, comment below or weigh on products you'd add to this list.

—Paul Reynolds.