Media Gadgets Flirt With 'Convergence'

Digital radio -- called HD Radio by its developer, Columbia-based iBiquity Digital -- was supposed to make a comparable splash in 2005, but HD Radio receivers remained an expensive rarity.

In the computer business, the progress was almost all in software, since computer hardware basically looked and acted as it had before (one exception: Apple's $500, book-size Mac mini desktop).

The Mozilla Firefox browser dismantled Microsoft's monopoly, winning over about 15 percent of the market in the United States. (By September, almost 17 percent of users of The Post's Web site ran Firefox.) That was a large enough share to persuade numerous Web sites to dump features that had required Microsoft's aging Internet Explorer browser.

The Web itself functioned more like an application than ever before, thanks to a new crop of amazingly useful sites, such as Google Maps, which offered the kind of interactive utility traditionally limited to stand-alone software.

Apple cranked out yet another round of updates to Mac OS X and its iLife multimedia suite, releasing iLife '05 in January and OS X 10.4 Tiger (the fourth OS X update since 2001) in April. It also announced in June that it would make all this software compatible with the Intel processors it plans to use in its computers starting this year -- an amazing transition if it can pull it off.

Windows XP remained its usual self, just with more security updates and newly discovered vulnerabilities (for instance, the flaw revealed last week that allows a malicious image to hijack a PC). XP needs the rewrite that won't come until Windows Vista arrives this fall, if all goes well. But 2005 did bring two worthwhile stopgap additions to Windows: Google's free Google Desktop search tool and Microsoft's free, still-in-beta-test Anti-Spyware.

Users gained two new, fast ways to go online: broadband powerline, which uses electrical wires to transmit Internet data, and Verizon's Fios fiber-optic service, which provides both high-speed Internet access and TV service in a small but growing number of areas.

All that cheap, fast bandwidth made voice over Internet protocol phone service and online video-conferencing from the likes of Vonage and Skype increasingly popular services. Unfortunately, it also made it quicker than ever to download all the viruses, worms, spyware and spam that made the usual nuisances of themselves in 2005. Technology can improve a lot of things, but it can't do much to change the people who use, and abuse, it.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.