Everybody and their cousin is publishing a "best gadgets of 2011" list this week, and most of them read like a press release stitched together by six different interns who never actually used the products. So here's mine. No spreadsheet, no scoring rubric, just what I bought, played with, or wanted to throw across the room this year.
1. Amazon Kindle Fire ($199)
I did not expect to like this thing as much as I do. I bought it mostly out of curiosity two weeks after it launched in November, figuring I'd return it if the software was garbage. It's not garbage, it's just... a little slow sometimes, and the lack of a volume rocker button in a sane spot drives me nuts. But for two hundred bucks you get a genuinely usable 7-inch tablet that handles email, Netflix, and reading without complaint. My mom asked me what to get my dad for Christmas and I said "this," and I stand by it. It's not an iPad killer. Nobody serious thought it was going to be. But it made "cheap tablet" into a real category instead of a punchline, and that matters more than the specs sheet suggests.
2. iPhone 4S
I was skeptical about Siri going in. Voice assistants have burned me before (remember trying to use voice dial on a flip phone in a loud coffee shop? I do, and it was humiliating). But I've genuinely used it, mostly for setting timers while cooking and texting my girlfriend when my hands are covered in flour. It's not magic. It fails constantly on anything with an accent-heavy name or a noisy room. Still, it's the first "talk to your phone" feature that didn't feel like a tech demo.
It's impossible to write about the 4S without mentioning that Steve Jobs died the week before most reviews went up. That cast a weird shadow over the whole launch cycle, whether Apple wanted it to or not. The phone itself is a solid, iterative upgrade, nothing revolutionary in the hardware, but it's the last one with his fingerprints on it in any real sense, and that's going to matter to people looking back on this even if the phone itself is just "4 but faster."
3. Samsung Galaxy Nexus
This one's for the nerds, and I say that as one. Ice Cream Sandwich is the first version of Android that doesn't look like it was designed by three separate teams who never spoke to each other. The typography's better, the notification shade actually feels considered, and the whole thing finally looks like somebody at Google sat down and thought about it as a product instead of a checklist. I've only had hands-on time with a friend's unit for about a week, but I came away impressed. It's not going to outsell the iPhone. It's not supposed to. It's the reference design, the one that shows what stock Android is capable of when nobody's skinned it into oblivion.
The thing that annoyed me most this year
Not a gadget exactly, but I have to mention Carrier IQ, because it's been eating my brain since Thanksgiving. Finding out there was software quietly logging keystrokes and app behavior baked into a huge number of phones, without anyone really asking users first, is the kind of story that should get more outrage than it did. It's still unfolding as I type this, with more carriers and manufacturers getting dragged into it every week. I don't think anyone's proven the worst-case scenario (that they're reading your texts), but the fact that a piece of software like that could sit on millions of phones for years without most people knowing it existed is not a great look for anybody involved, and I'm annoyed it took this long for it to become a real story.
Honorable mention, sort of: nothing from the desktop world
I use Ubuntu at home and Unity in 11.10 still feels like it's fighting me half the time I open it. That's not a 2011 gadget pick, obviously, just a grumble I needed to get out before the year ends.
Anyway. That's my list. Ask me again in six months and the Kindle Fire might have slid down a spot once the software gets a proper update, but as of right now, at the end of December, that's where things stand on my desk.