Products of the Year 2006

With Christmas and the January sales upon us, now is a good time to look back at the products we’ve seen this year, and hold up our personal favourites for congratulations and our least favourites for public ridicule.

These are not, it must be stressed, the PCW Awards for Excellence winners – those are either team or reader voted and will be announced in late January. Instead what follows are personal favourites – and least favourites – from each member of staff.

There were no team decisions here. On a personal note I don’t agree with them all. But then, members of the team won’t agree with all my choices.

Rob Jones
Online Editor in Chief
I consider few products to be innovative. Most are step changes that bring improvements, but rarely have the wow factor that stops you in your tracks. A product this year that was, in my eyes, truly innovative, was Sling Media’s Slingbox.

The Slingbox allows you to watch your home TV anywhere in the world via the internet. When Sling Media brought its ugly looking device in for a demo, I was prepared to be sceptical, but left impressed.

I’ve tested it all over the world, accessing my home TV from places as far a field as Taiwan, the US or even just our office in London. It really comes into its own if you have Sky+, and whatever you can do with your remote at home, the Slingbox can do over the internet. And it has an inbuilt Freeview tuner too.

Sure, it’s not as good as watching programmes on your TV, but you have to marvel at the technological innovation. I gave the Slingbox four out of five stars in my review. It’s one of only a handful of products where, on reflection, I was too harsh in my scoring.

Another that falls into that category is a simple little product that I hated when I first saw it. The Mogo travel mouse, little bigger and thicker than a couple of credit cards, looked uncomfortable to use and smacked of a product looking for a problem.

But I’m now a big fan of the little fella. It’s comfortable to use, is the best travel mouse I’ve come across and I like that it’s stored in your laptop’s PC Card slot. It got three stars, but I should have given it four.

I was tempted to say my final product of the year was Intel’s impressive Core 2 Duos, which finally knocked AMD off the processor top spot. But instead I’ve gone for a product that beat my expectations.

This year, I drove across Europe, taking in countries such as Germany, Austria, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, to name a few, and what better way to test a sat nav that claimed to have seamless European road maps.

I took the Medion GoPal PNA 515, which raised a few eyebrows in the office. But with maps guiding us to the bottom of Croatia, this sat nav rarely got it wrong. It had the odd mad moment, but when we needed it to get us through complicated junctions, it did so.

What better testament can you give than that in around 2,500 miles of driving, never a harsh word was spoken over directions.

There were of course, products that were a big let-down, and my two I first saw in January 2006 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.