via Gizmodo by Wilson Rothman on 12/18/09
Nine years ago, as a young tech reporter at Time Magazine, I co-wrote a buyer's guide with the latest and greatest gear known to man. Today, it sounds ridiculous.
• Creative's $500 Nomad Jukebox (pictured above), was not only "sleek"—at least when compared to a CD Walkman—but "can hold as much music as 150 CDs."
• The Extiva was a $350 DVD player from Samsung with the Nuon chip, so "you can also play videogames." Not sure which videogames we were referring to there.
• Our pick for digital camera was Nikon's twisty CoolPix 990, 3 million pixels for 1 thousand dollars.
• Gateway laptop with 12.1-in. display, 550MHz chip and a year of free AOL was "a great deal" at $1300.
• Two-way pagers from Motorola, $180 each, let you send messages back and forth, and came in "four hot colors."
• LG's Touchpoint 3000 smartish phone cost $400, combined an address book and an organizer, and had one killer app: "Tap someone's name, and it dials for you."
• The $300 Iomega HipZip took little PocketZip magnetic disks instead of flash memory so it was easier to "get with the MP3 revolution"—hooray for obscure proprietary formats that died within a year!
• Cybiko was invented a decade ago but promised to do almost more than what the Peek does today—with wireless messaging and an MP3 "attachment."
• "It's near impossible to find this killer game console—and just as hard to find good titles to play on it." The console? PlayStation 2.
• Handspring Visor Prism, the great hope of the PDA world, had a cartridge slot so that you could "turn it into a cellphone, an MP3 player, or a miniature digital camera." Only trouble was when the cartridges started costing more than the $450 PDA.
The whole list is pretty hilarious—I encourage you to pop over and read more. [Time.com]
I apologize for the crappy quality of some of the images—I had to go grab promo shots found out on the web. For some reason, Time didn't preserve our gorgeous photoshoot online. Guess they thought the internet was just a fad.
