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Your pick of the years top gadgets
Some of the gadget highlights of the last 12 months include tablets, 3D TVs, apps and smartphones with more advanced features than ever.

Durning 2010 we've reviewed a wide selection of phones, laptops, TVs and tablets on T3.com and in T3 magazine. You can read what our reviewers thought in our Five Star Gadgets of 2010 review, but what about your choices? Click on the link below to view (in no particular order) 10 of the most popular T3 reader gadgets of 2010. Will your favourites be there?

LG 42LE4900 review

                                            Stylish and affordable, but not quite a class act
The 42LE4900 is a slither of a screen . Taking advantage of LG’s diminutive spin on Edge LED backlighting, it stretches back less than 30mm. It’s also very affordable, retailing around £600 although this hasn’t dented the specification.

Given the budget nature of the TV, design is decidedly upmarket. We particularly like the central ‘Standby’ light above the pedestal. This glows red like a Cylon’s peeper, fidgeting when activated.


The LE4900 puts a friendly face forward. Once you’ve wrestled with the ironmongery that is the 20 degree swivel pedestal, you’re good to go. The screen has a well-thought out picture wizard, which allows you to quickly set correct black and white levels, sharpness and colour saturation.

Navigation is via LG’s simple tiled interface, and if that proves too unwieldy there’s a secondary Quick menu to scoot around. Both are equally intuitive, enlivened by clear, understandable graphics.

After months of neglect, LG’s Netcast online content offering has had a serious update. There’s now a healthy selection of free and PPV content to browse, including BBC iPlayer, YouTube, V Tuner internet radio, Acetrax, Facebook and Google maps.

Network media compatibility is also rather good. We had success streaming AVIs and MKVs, although one particular AVI test file was deemed ‘invalid’. File support from USB media is comparable.

Image quality, however, is unremarkable. Edge LED may enable the screen to achieve Cheryl Cole levels of slimness, but its execution is problematic. The backlight is clearly uneven, with bright peaks taunting you from each corner. The set’s inability to resolve fine motion detail also takes the shine off its Freeview HD channel performance - the LE4900 sorely misses the brand’s proprietary anti-blur TruMotion technology. Without it, there’s limited HD texture in faces and other moving objects. The set does have a Real Cinema anti-judder setting but this doesn’t resolve motion clarity. To avoid overscan, view HD sources in the Just Scan mode, available from the aspect ratio menu.

Audio is average, but that’s not through any lack of modes. There are Standard, Music, Cinema, Sport or Game presets, as well as LG’s proprietary Infinite Sound mode. This aspires to create a surround soundfield from the two downward firing speakers in the TV’s bezel. It doesn’t work, of course, but gets points for chutzpah.

Gorgeous to look at and surprisingly well equipped, but struggles to keep the Hi in Def

The Smart Grid

 

Turbulence ahead: Without systematic upgrades to electrical grids, it will be difficult to integrate large amounts of power from intermittent renewable sources such as the wind and sun.
Credit: Richard Cummins/Corbis

Electrical grids, the interconnected systems that transmit and distribute power, are at the heart of how we use energy. Yet despite their importance, in many places around the world these grids are falling apart. In the United States, while electricity demand increased by about 25 percent between 1990 and 1999, construction of transmission infrastructure decreased by 30 percent. Since then, annual investment in transmission has increased again, but much of the grid remains antiquated and overloaded.
Aging grids mean an unreliable electricity supply. They are also an obstacle to the use of renewable power sources such as wind and solar. It is estimated that generating electricity creates 11.4 billion tons of carbon emissions worldwide each year—nearly 40 percent of all energy-related carbon emissions. Renewable sources could reduce those emissions, but grids that were designed for a steady flow of power from fossil-fuel and nuclear plants have trouble dealing with the variable nature of wind and solar power.

Google Offers Cloud-Based Learning Engine

Providing developers with machine learning on tap could unleash a flood of smarter apps.
From Amazon's product recommendations to Pandora's ability to find us new songs we like, the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events.

Now Google has launched a service that could bring such smarts to many more apps. Google Prediction API provides a simple way for developers to create software that learns how to handle incoming data. For example, the Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds. Future e-mails could then be screened by software using that API, and handled accordingly.
Currently just "hundreds" of developers have access to the service, says Travis Green, Google's product manager for Prediction API, "but already we can see people doing some amazing things." Users range from developers of mobile and Web apps to oil companies, he says. "Many want to do product recommendation, and there are also interesting NGO use cases with ideas such as extracting emergency information from Twitter or other sources online."
Machine learning is not an easy feature to build into software. Different algorithms and mathematical techniques work best for different kinds of data. Specialized knowledge of machine learning is typically needed to consider using it in a product, says Green                         Google's service provides a kind of machine-learning black box--data goes in one end, and predictions come out the other. There are three basic commands: one to upload a collection of data, another telling the service to learn what it can from it, and a third to submit new data for the system to react to based on what it learned.
"Developers can deploy it on their site or app within 20 minutes," says Green. "We're trying to provide a really easy service that doesn't require them to spend month after month trying different algorithms." Google's black box actually contains a whole suite of different algorithms. When data is uploaded, all of the algorithms are automatically applied to find out which works best for a particular job, and the best algorithm is then used to handle any new information submitted.
"Getting machine learning to a Google scale is significant," says Joel Confino, a software developer in Philadelphia who builds large-scale Web apps for banks and pharmaceutical companies, and a member of the preview program. He used Prediction API to quickly develop a simple yet effective spam e-mail filter, and he says the service has clear commercial potential.

Augmented Reality Lacks Bite for Marketers

Companies are experimenting with adding AR layers to real-world scenes. So far, it's not doing much to boost business.
ake out your smart phone and point its camera at the field. If the resulting image on your screen shows a giant Quiznos toaster floating above the grass, does that make you more inclined to go get a Quiznos sandwich?
How about if you were at Mount Rushmore and you saw the four carved presidents sipping cola from Quiznos cups? Would that influence your lunch plans? Or what if you were on Wall Street, and aiming your smart phone at a real-world statue of a bull yielded an image of it enjoying virtual nachos?

Flexible Printed Electronics Advance

Wonder material graphene wins Nobel Prize, flexible electronics head to market, and advances hint at the future of displays. single-atom-thick carbon material (Graphene Wins Nobel Prize), Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both in the physics department at the University of Manchester, have received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Perhaps one reason the prize was bestowed so soon after the work it recognizes is that materials scientists have already taken graphene from basic science experiments to prototypes of new devices. In one noteworthy example from this year, researchers at IBM made graphene transistor arrays that operate at 100 gigahertz—switching on and off 100 billion times each second, about 10 times as fast as the speediest silicon transistors (Graphene Transistors that Can Work at Blistering Speeds). Work at Samsung capitalized on graphene's conductivity and flexibility to make flexible touch screens (Flexible Touch Screen Made with Printed Graphene).
Flexible Printed Electronics Advance
Other flexible materials for electronics also saw progress this year. Working with carbon nanotubes, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota made the fastest printed electronics yet (Record Performance for Printed Electronics). Printed electronics holds out the promise of flexible devices that can be fabricated at high volume and low cost. Researchers at HP continued their work scaling up flexible display drivers made from thin films of silicon on rolls of plastic (Inexpensive, Unbreakable Displays and A Flexible Color Display). Meanwhile, groups at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, printed pressure sensors that match the sensitivity of human skin (Electric Skin that Rivals the Real Thing and Printing Electronic Skin).