10 best products of the past 200 issues (part 1)
How do you choose 10 great
products from the thousands we’ve reviewed? Simple: you look for innovation,
longevity and popularity, then back away slowly and let the arguments begin.
Matt egan explains
Trying to choose only 10 great products
from the thousands we’ve reviewed is an impossible task. We’ve been testing and
ranking all the technology we can get our hands on each month since we launched
in 1995. We’ve had a dedicated online reviews section only since 2004, but head
to pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews and you’ll find in excess of 10,100 products-we now
post more than 100 each month! So we’ve had to make some brutal choices, and
your favourites may not have made our short list.
Perhaps in another 200 months google
android will make the grade, or even window 8. But for now, you’ll find no
blackberry or products from tech giants such as dell, canon, adobe and hp here.
We’ve focused only on the products that have stood out for innovation and
longevity.
We looked for the devices, software and
services that surprised us when they emerged, proved popular, and paved the way
for future technology.
Not all of our 10 great products remain
popular, although as surprising number do. It’s intriguing to note how few
microsoft products made our list-and how many of those that did are deadly
rivals to microsoft releases, microsoft is at or near the top of a number of
product categories, but the twin phenomena of pc advisor’s lifetime have
been apple and google. Hats off to them
We hope you’ll enjoy our 10 best products,
and we’re sure you’ll want to have your say. Head to tinyurl.com/cqd2k52 and
let us know what you think, and which products you think should be here.
Google web search
You know something is a success when its
brand name becomes the de facto noun for a generic type of product or service-think
hoover and vacuum cleaner. Google goes one step further: to ‘google’ is the
verb commonly used to describe a web search, by any means. Google doesn’t like
this, but the fact remains that for many people, any web search is ‘googling’.
So google is a success, with its hundreds
of millions of queries each day. We’d say so. For all that web search remains
an imperfect science; the internet without google is a bizarre idea-like
computer without the internet.
Launched in 1997 as the brainchild of
larry page and sergey brin, google orders search results by ‘pagerank’, a
metric by which the search engine’s web crawlers rank pages on the net.
Initially, google search’s success was down to three factors: it was nice to
look at, easy to use, and it ranked sites in a way that more closely resembled
the opinions of web users. Whereas other search engines paid attention to the
keywords n urls website operators uploaded, google cared about user-led factors
such as the links people place on websites and blogs.
Now google is the biggest seller or
advertising in the world. Website owners spend huge fortunes attempting to
improve their ranking, and every time google so much as tweaks its pagerank
algorithm it has the potential to affect the bottom line of almost every
business in the western world.
More importantly, the web user’s
experience has changed forever. Google lets you search for synonyms, currency
and metric conversions, weather forecasts, time-zone information and so on.
Users interact with a much wider variety of online sites and services, knowing
that if the information is out there, a google search is likely to find it. And
because google meticulously records data on who is searching for what, when and
where, we all know a great deal more about what matters to people, as it
happens.
Google web search changed the world, and
made several fortunes. And that’s not bad for something that was initially set
up as a tool for academics.
Apple iPhone
The original version of apple’s
smartphone hit shop sheves in 2007. It lacks many of the aspects that make more
recent models great, such as 3g connectivity, so why would the first-generation
iPhone be one of our 10 top products?
Like other great apple products, the iPhone
took ideas and technologies available elsewhere and combined them in one
desirable, reliable product. By creating a good-looking and intuitive gadget
that anyone could use as a mobile phone, web browser and mp3 player, apple
re-invigorated and redefined the mobile market.
Apple already had the mobile audio
players market sewn up with the ipod, and moved lock, stock and barrel its
seamless music-playing ecosystem from ‘pod to’ phone. Iphone web browsing was a
world beyond that experienced on other handsets, and the original iPhone
introduced visual voicemail, multi-touch gestures, html email, threaded text
messaging and youtube video. Indeed, even ‘missing’ functions such as cut and
paste, push email and multimedia messages made it on to the iPhone after a couple
of software updates. And that’s before we get to apps. Apple’s app store is the
home to a staggering array of software serices, and it all started with this
device.
Look around now and you’ll see
smartphones of all flavour that resemble the original iPhone. The principal
innovation the iPhone brought to the world was its use of multi-touch input.
It’s strange to recall that many sage observers at the time steve jobs
announced the iPhone thought it couldn’t succeed without a hardware keyboard.
The iPhone had then, and retains now, only a handful of hardware buttons-and
now rim is increasingly isolated in including qwerty keyboards on its
blackberry mobile devices.
When jobs announced the iPhone, he
described it as a “widescreen ipod with touch controls”, a “revolutionary
mobile phone”, and a “breakthrough internet communicator”. That it was all of
these things and in each case successfully so, makes the first-generation iPhone
one of the 10 best products we’ve covered.
Microsoft Windows XP
Like the footballer whose team loses when
he doesn’t play, Windows XP looks better the longer it’s absent from the front
line of desktop oses. During its lifetime as microsoft’s number-one os, XP was
respected rather than loved. A useful tool, present on almost all pcs-but not a
product anyone got excited about-XP launched in 2001.
But XP is great because it represents a
brief period when microsoft focused not on what it might be able to do, but on
building a product that worked. With none of the instability and
incompatibility issues that plagued vista and Windows 95, XP shines because it
is better than those oses, as well as predecessors Windows 2000 and 98.
It is the best of Windows: relatively
stable and full of useful features. And XP has stood the test of time. Only
time will tell whether Windows 7 can come close to matching XP’s success-if it
does, it will be a great product. After all, Windows is used on the vast
majority of pcs throughout the world for a reason: when it’s good, it’s very
good.
Xp was the first Windows os to include
task panes, tiles and filmstrip views. It had built-in cd burning, and would
let you search by document type, Windows picture and fax viewer made their debuts
alongside faster start-up, better power management and various kernel restore
and recovery functions were added, as well as usb 2.0 and firewire 800
connectivity. The Windows firewall made its first appearance in sp2, as did
wireless-networking capabilities.
Built on the Windows nt kernel, XP was
noticeably more stable than 9x versions of Windows. It also looks unlike any
previous versions of Windows, featuring an overhauled graphical user interface.
What’s innovative and user-friendly to one person is a hideous change to the
next, but XP’s popularity and longevity suggest its usability is considered
good by most.
Windows XP made its bow in 2001, and was
succeeded in 2006. And yet 27 percent of all visitor to pcadvisor.co.uk still
use XP-more than twice the number of those who use Windows vista, me, 2000 and
98 combined. XP remains the standard by which other Windows oses are judged.
