This article is also contributed by Vijay Anand, Adrian Chan, Aloysius Low, Alvin Soon, Kenny Yeo, Sutlej Soin, Seow Tein Hee and Luke Tan.

The Year in Review

In the grand scheme of things, the many developments in the tech industry for 2008 will probably fade from our memories in a couple of years. Many of the products and technologies that we have seen are not exactly groundbreaking; they are evolutionary. Those that are truly groundbreaking could be such a dark horse on its debut that we'll only realize it a decade from now. Hence, we see more of the same products (or their sequels) dominating the sales charts and news headlines: more Apple iPhones, more Nintendo Wii, more Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Yet 2008 did see some major developments that could make it to the history books. For once, Sony finally saw one of its formats win the war. After a lengthy struggle, Blu-ray became the official format for HD content after Toshiba-led HD DVD conceded defeat. There's still a lot of uncertainty about the viability of the medium however, with the Internet posing a stiff challenge, especially with online stores like Apple's iTunes Store.

Intel continues to steamroll the competition with moves towards 32nm chip production while launching its next generation architecture that prepares it for a future with even more processing cores and memory bandwidth. Rival AMD did manage to stage a revival for its GPU business with the impressive Radeon HD 4000 series while spinning off its foundry business bought it some time to continue its business restructuring. The recent ratification of the OpenCL standard is another interesting and perhaps significant milestone in shifting our computing models to a data-parallel version.

The touch interface trend that we mentioned last year rode another huge wave of popularity in 2008, with more handheld devices designed with this interface in mind coming to market. With Windows 7 and its multi-touch support expected to launch next year, this is one trend that will go mainstream very soon, if it's not already.

Another sight to behold was the opening of the floodgates in the netbook market, with practically every vendor trying to duplicate the success of the ASUS Eee PC. Similarly powered by Intel's Atom, these inexpensive, portable devices hit the right chords with consumers and in our opinion, is a pretty big message to manufacturers that in this age of prevalent, free Internet connectivity, staying connected for cheap (and long) is more desired than raw performance.

Then of course, there are the technologies that have promised much but have not delivered yet. WiMAX for instance has been in the headlines for quite a while but there has been little real progress on the implementation despite Intel's efforts. We could say the same for Sony's PlayStation 3, the slow burner of a console that still remains third in the console stakes despite its 'technological' edge, which goes to show that tech adoption is not solely about superior technology.


Best of 2008 Awards

So what are the tech gadgets and products that have struck our fancy this year? From consumer electronics to PC components, the top 100 products that we have short listed here cover the entire gamut of technology. These are products that truly deserve a mention for being outstanding and influential in their respective categories, many of which the editorial team have methodologically tested and reviewed through the year. In no particular order of merit, our top picks of the best 100 products of the year are as follows:-