Ermm now we are at the end of 2008.This year has seen furious competition between tech manufacturers, especially in the areas of mobile connectivity. Frankly, people want the net in their pocket, or at least in their backpack. People are starting to care less about the voice telephony aspects of their phones and more about the internet connectivity.
Apple's iPhone really shook the market up when it was released, with a software interface that was unparalleled anywhere in the marketplace. This forced mobile phone makers to stop thinking like engineers and start putting ease-of-use first.
The new iPhone 3G spearheaded mobile web use with the addition of high-speed internet connectivity, making it one of the year's top buys.
Laptop maker ASUS made the stunning discovery that the smaller the laptop, the cheaper it should be, with its very successful $499 Eee PC. This sparked a flurry of innovation (cloning, copying and duplicating) across the industry, with each PC maker bringing out its own cheap, small laptop.
Even if you're not in the market to replace your mobile or laptop, you can now add mobile internet cheaply, at long last. Carriers have dumped their requirements for long contracts of two or three years to get your laptop online via 3G and now offer a swathe of prepaid options. Of course, Telstra Next G is the only choice when it comes to extremely broad coverage and very fast speeds but it is expensive and the prepaid vouchers have short expiry periods. Three's prepaid mobile broadband is a stunningly good deal - on a network that provides good speeds, too.
Granted, any man on the street could have told computer makers that their ultraportable notebooks were way overpriced. But we're glad they reached that conclusion in the end. Dell's Mini 9 is our pick of the year because it has 3G HSDPA mobile broadband built in and you can get it from Vodafone for $0 upfront.
Of course, you're going to need to drive to the shop without getting lost to pick up your smartphone, netbook or mobile broadband dongle and this is where a GPS navigator comes in. Beware if you drive in peak hour though - navigators will often blindly steer you through roads that slow to a crawl. If you have a new TomTom with "IQ routes", though, it'll steer clear of slow-moving roads at all times of day and give you the fastest route to that shopping centre. Finding a parking spot, on the other hand, is entirely up to you.
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