Good evening and welcome to the third annual Pogie awards!
As you know, this award was created to celebrate the tiny glints of cleverness and innovation that sometimes appear in consumer electronics. We award 10 Pogie trophies — not to products, but to individual features within them.
These are the small breakthroughs that made it through the committee and past the marketers and lawyers, the tiny improvements that should become standard in their product categories.
Visual voice mail
Everybody knows that the iPhone’s voice mail software is not just one of the machine’s best features, but the way voice mail should be from now on.
On a normal cell phone, you dial in and listen to some half-awake lady drone,
“You...have...thirty...one...messages,” followed by 15 seconds of pointless instructions that are meant to eat up your minutes.
On an iPhone, your messages are listed as in your e-mail program. You tap one to play it. No dialing, no instructions and you can listen to the messages in any order you like.
TV thumbwheel
The Vudu (vudu.com) is a $400 box that connects to your TV and offers instant access to 5,000 movies. (You can watch a movie for $2 to $4, or buy it for $15 or $20.)
But the real genius is the clickable scroll wheel on the Vudu’s remote, exactly like the one on a computer mouse. It’s ideal for navigating the Vudu’s lists. During playback, the wheel is a variable-speed rewind or fast-forward shuttle control.
A scroll wheel would work equally wonderfully on TiVo-type recorders and even audio systems and TV sets. You could adjust the volume or zip from channel 4 to channel 723 with a couple of quick spins on the wheel.
Instant click
It’s absurd how much effort you have to expend just to give a freshly snapped photo to somebody standing next to you. Some of Fujifilm’s latest cameras offer a perfect on-the-spot solution — instant camera-to-camera infrared photo beaming. A full-resolution photo arrives in someone else’s camera in only three seconds.
T-Mobile home Everybody knows that you can make phone calls over the Internet — just ask the 250 million people who use Skype. Imagine how cool that would be on a cell phone, though. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, you could make free calls, without using up your monthly minutes.
On its HotSpot (AT) Home phones, all calls are free when you’re in a hot spot. You even get a free Wi-Fi base station for your home, so all calls at home are free too. If you leave the house, your call is handed off to T-Mobile’s cellular network seamlessly; you go right on chatting. Better yet, calls that began in a hot spot remain free even after you’re on the cell network.
Hear less
Christine Ingemi is worried about the effects of iPod listening on her children’s hearing.
One day, she could hear those back-seat earbuds all the way from the driver’s seat of the van and she decided to do something about it.
She tried setting the iPod’s volume limiter, which requires a password to bypass. But her young iPod fans wiped out the password by resetting the iPod.
So she invented the iHearSafe earbuds, which replace the earbuds on any music player. They limit the volume to 80 decibels, or 85 if bass or treble boost is turned on. (A standard iPod goes up to 120 decibels.)
Shared media folders
Programs like VMWare Fusion and Parallels permit you to run Windows on a Macintosh without having to restart the computer. You get Windows in a window, on top of Mac OS X.
This year, those programs have added a lovely little idea — you can tell Windows to use the Mac’s music, pictures and movies folders as its own.
Both operating systems now hook up to the same photo, music and video collections, which makes overwhelming sense.
Lamp speakers
Installing ceiling speakers is expensive and messy, and it doesn't put the speakers at the right height.
The Soundolier Duo Wireless Speaker Lamp is also expensive but it neatly solves the cosmetic issues. A 5.25-inch speaker is hidden inside what looks like a stylish black torchiere-style floor lamp. A wireless transmitter for your TV eliminates the speaker cables.
Map your way Google Maps (maps.google.com) has been blowing MapQuest off the charts for some time now. But three new features make it great.
Street View — a 360-degree panoramic view of any spot on a street — it’s an amazing way to see where you’re going, find out what sort of neighborhood to expect and so on.
Google Maps displays live traffic data with colour coding on major roads.
Finally, when Google shows you its suggested driving route on the map, you can drag that line onto another road with your mouse. You might want to avoid that traffic, take a more scenic route or just use a shortcut.
Cellular flash drive
For $60 a month, you can enjoy the ultimate geek luxury of high-speed wireless Internet. You just need a cellular modem.
You can get one either as a card for your laptop’s card slot or a USB stick that resembles a flash drive.
Novatel’s idea is to make a cellular USB antenna that actually is a USB flash drive. The new Ovation U727 lets you install a MicroSD memory card (up to 4 gigabytes).
For all its problems, 2007 was actually a great year for fresh tech ideas.
If the recent rate of innovation is any indication, 2008 should be a happy new year indeed.
