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THE NEW YORK TIMES

Monday, January 23, 2006

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY Greatest New Ideas in the World of Gadgets

By David Pogue

For lovers of gadgets, some of the joys in the year just ended were not new products, but aspects of new products. Here and there, you could even find tiny touches of brilliance: clever steps forward and new additions to old features. Here they are, the five best gadget ideas of 2005. THE VOICE MAIL VCR — Voice mail is a delightful invention. But trying to remember which keys to press for replay, skip, delete and so on is not so delightful, especially if you have more than one voice mail system to learn. Thanks to Palm, then, for adding VCR-style buttons on the touch screen of its coming Treo 700W cellphone. You just tap Skip, Play, Delete, or what­ever. The phone remembers which touch tones to play so you don't have to.

THE FRONT-SIDE TV CONNECTOR — The home-theater explosion is all well and good, except for the tangle of cables. Depending on how per­manently your TV has been built into your cabinetry, getting behind it to plug or unplug something is a pain.

Hewlett-Packard's latest microdisplay (rear projection) TV sets solve the problem sweetly and simply: everything plugs into the front. A broad tunnel lets you hand each cable to yourself from the back, an illuminated connection panel makes it easy to see what you're doing at the front, and an attractive door hides the whole ingenious system.

TV A LA CARTE — It's always seemed crazy that TV companies would spend $1 million an episode writing and producing a program that is shown only once. Yet the obvious solution — making past shows available for purchase on the Internet — gave TV executives nightmares of Web pirates run amok.

It took Apple to persuade them to dip a little toe into the Internet wa­ters. The American television network ABC took the first plunge, offering iPod owners five shows' worth of archives for $2 each — and no commercials. NBC network came next with broader menu of shows. The concept was a hit, and the era of downloadable, reasonably priced, lightly copyprotected TV episodes is finally upon us.

THE OUTER-BUTTON FLIP PHONE — First came the cellphone with a hinge (the flip phone). Then came the flip phone with an external screen, so you could see who was calling. Problem was this arrangement deprived you of the option to dismiss the call or send it to voice mail. If you opened the flip phone to get to the Ignore button, you'd answer the call — unless you'd turned off the "opening phone answers the call" feature, in which case you lost one great convenience of having a flip phone to begin with.

The solution? Add buttons on the outside. When a call comes in to the LG VX8100, for example, its external identifies the caller — and the small buttons just below it are labeled Ignore (let it ring until voice mail picks up) or Dismiss (send it directly and immediately to voice mail). You get the best of all cellular worlds, without opening the phone.

THE FREE DOMAIN NAME — A domain name is what comes before the ".com" in a Web address — like NYTimes.com, verizonwireless.com or Mar-ryMeBritney.com. Getting your own personal dot-com name has its privileges — for example, your e-mail address can be You@YourNameHere. com — but it costs money and requires some expertise. It took Microsoft, of all companies, to make getting your own dot-com name free. Its new Office Live online software suite for small businesses, now in testing, will offer a domain name, Web site and e-mail accounts free.