It is a snapshot of the products igniting the tech world at this moment in time. Much of the gear has just landed or will touch down shortly. But all of it is blowing us away. Hottest 10 Hi-Tech Technologies is all about the products that are the most talked about and anticipated by most all peoples. This list is the most explosive ever.
10. HTC Flyer
HTC is Android's BFF. It was there at the birth Google's mobile OS and the first to overlay it with a more user-friendly interface in the form of sense UI. It's since won favour with critics and consumers alike-three of the five top-selling UK mobiles were HTC's last month-so it's only logical that it's now serving up a Honeycomb tablet. This seven-inch wunderkind wraps an aluminium unibody around a 1024x600-pixel screen and nippy 1.5 GHz processor. Making it useful for more than just browsing and consuming is the smart stylus, which utilises HTC's new Scribe Technology to make time-stamped notes.
9 & 8. LG Optimus 3D and Samsung Galaxy S II
A saturated market had started to leave us wondering where phones could go next, but this brace of dualcore devices from South Korean tech giants point to the smartphone's second coming. LG's effort produces 3DS-style, glasses-free 3D on its massive 4.3-inch display. It can capture and process 3D stills and video too, through twin five-meg cameras.
The Galaxy S II has no gimmicks as imressive as that, but its dualcore processor and full gigabyte of RAM should make downloads, apps, games and HD video unprecedentedly fast and smooth. It's also only 8.49 mm thick and very light to boot. Both mobile use Android, and lay down the gauntlet to Apple. Can iPhone 5 possibly measure up to these super-mobiles?
7. Sony HDR-TD10
Sony realises that the initial success of 3D relies heavily on early adopters making their own eye-popping content. Hence the Bloggie 3D and this, the best-looking 3D camcoder to date (not with standing the fact that Sony appears to have ripped Wall-E's head off in order to build it). Whereas some other 3D cams reduce the resolution by forcing both images through the same sensor and don't allow zooming, the TD10 has two independent HP sensors and a 10x optical zoom. It'll store up to five hours of 1920x1080 3D footage ready to be viewed on the 3.5-inch Xtra Fine LCD display without the need for specs, or on your new 3D TV. You can also watch 3D footage back in full-HD 2D, shoul you be in the shameful situation of lacking a state-of-the-art telly.
6. Motorola Xoom
With Android 3.0 Honeycomb on board, the Xoom makes the first Galaxy Tab and other early Android tablets look a bit Fisher Price. Its crisp, 10.1-inch, widescreen display has a higher resolution than the iPad 2 and provides ample room for myriad apps and self-updating widgets, such as Google Books and the revamped Gmail for mobile. The 1GHz dualcore processor and tabbed web browser give the kind of polished performance it needs to take on iPad 2. Your communication needs are taken care of thanks to Wi-Fi, optional 3G and two cameras-a rear-mounted five-meg/720p HD one and an impressive two-meg/VGA, front-facing webcam. Add Falsh support-it should be here by the time you read this-and you have both a killer Android and the first real iPad rival.
5. Samsung BD-D7500
Following in the footsteps of the DVD players they've superseded. Blu-ray decks have largely been unappetising slabs of black designed to squat under your telly like malevolent metal turds. Not so the wall-mountable, ineffably lovely, very boringly named BD-D7500. The slimmest 3D BD deck money can buy is just 28 mm deep and can upscale 2D to 3D as well as upscaling non-HD materials to 1080p. It also allows you to wirelessly download thousands of movies if you've shelled out for a six-quid lovefilm subscription, as well as DLNA for streaming your own music and movies. Don't hate it for being beautiful.
4. Sony NGP
This is higher up the Hotness Index than arch-rival Nintindo's 3DS because it bypasses gimmicks such as 3D and goes all out for heavyweight specs. The dual joypads finally allow proper control in a games. While a touchscreen and gyroscope give game developers plenty of other options. The quadcore processor allows for, at the very least, PS2-quality games, while the five-inch, 960x544 widescreen should serve as a crystal-clear window onto virtual worlds. Of course it also higher up the Hottest 10 because it won't be out till Christmas. Remember the immutable law of the tech world:perceived hotness is in inverse proportion to the amount of time spent actually using stuff.
3. RIM BlackBerry Playbox
RIM is taking on Apple and the Android brigade with its own OS and the off-putting tagline of "The world's first professional-grade tablet". RIM's punting the Playboox to its traditional business market then, you might think, but twin HD cameras, access to 7 Digital's excellent music store, superb video on the multi-touch, high-res, 1024x600 screen, a web browser with support for flash 10.1 and "hard core gaming" are not the stuff of dry accountancy seminars. With a 1GHz dualcore processor and 1GB of RAM, N Wi-Fi and the promise of 4G access (where avalaible, ie: not here) this thing shoul really fly..
2. Apple iPad 2
And in a lowly conference centre in Cupertino, the new iPad was born unto us. And yea, Apple's saviour who is called Steve Jobs did see fit to bless it with a faster dualcore CPU and the miracle of "nine times faster graphics"-have faith, brothers-HD video recording and cameras both on the front and yea, unto the back. "And lo, "The Jobs proclaimed, "it shalt be 33 per cent thinner, up to 15 per cent lighter, have a slick new OS and shall retain the same teh-hour battery life and price as my last tablet testament."
1. Motorola Atrix 4G
And so, after much heated debate, this year's hottest gadget is a phone. No, a media server. Oh hang on, no, it's a laptop.
Winning nine awards on its unveiling at CES 2011, this leek Android smartphone boasts the same dualcore Nvidia Tegra 2 processor as Moto's Xoom (#6), 1 GB of a RAM and a four-inch, 960x540 screen. Despite that, it's lighter than the iPhone 4 at 135 g.
That's impressive, if not exceptional-witness the Samsung Galaxy S-but the USP that's grabbed the world's tech heads' attention is its unprecendented versatility and potential to transform a product category, The Atrix, which will be launched exclusively on Orange, can be hooked up to ahost of peripherals via its multimedia dock. Three USBs let you add a keyboard and mouse, while an HDMI output lets you use your TV as a screen, turning the Atrix into a media computer and mini set-top box.
Add Motorola's Lapdock and it becomes an 11.6-inch laptop with eight hours of battery life. We're so excited about it all thet we've run out of room to talk about the 1080p camera, the 4G-readiness, the 16 GB of storage, and the fingerprint scanner.
