The 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year

Samsung and Seagate each have shipped new hard drives that combine traditional hard-disk media with a flash cache to improve both reliability and performance. Our tests of theSamsung Spinpoint MH80 and the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD($250 and $190, respectively) showed that the 256MB NAND flash cache provides some clear benefits--particularly in power saving and read speed.

Innovation: Allows digital cameras to upload wirelessly to photo-sharing sites or your PC.Eye-Fi Card

Benefit: Wi-Fi-enabled SD Card bridges digital photography's wireless divide.

TheEye-Fi Card($100) does what few digital cameras have done, and what no digital camera has done well: enable wireless uploading to a photo-sharing site. Pop the 2GB SD Card into your camera and fire off a few shots, and the Wi-Fi-enabled card transmits the images to your preferred site--and, if you like, to your PC. The setup is simple, the device imposes no limitations on the image size, and the uploads happen.

Innovation: Packs full 1080p high-definition resolution into today's most popular size for flat-screen televisions, 42 inches.

Benefit: Stellar image quality.

Though 1080p LCD sets quickly became commonplace in 2007, showing 1080 vertical lines on a plasma TV this small remained technically difficult. Panasonic's efforts paid off: In our tests theTH-42Z700U($1800) earned stellar image-quality marks. With high-definition content from Blu-Ray and HD DVD sources, the picture is phenomenal; and because it's a plasma, even standard-definition programs look pretty good.

Innovative Products, Numbers 16 through 20

Innovation: Inspired and intuitive handheld instrument redefines music-making.Yamaha Tenori-On

Benefit: Nothing else even comes close to Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai's digital instrument.

While the Tenori-On is likely to appeal to a fairly specialized audience, the device screams innovation. Consisting of a 16-by-16 grid of LED-illuminated buttons that a user touches to manipulate sound in a variety of intuitive and eye-catching ways, the Tenori-On--designed by the creator of the cult-hit Nintendo DS music game Electroplankton--is like nothing you've ever seen (head tothe Tenori-On clip on YouTubefor a product demonstration video). It has 256 built-in sounds, and an integrated SD Card slot lets you copy original samples from your computer. You can also use its MIDI-out port to connect with your PC's music software or your other hardware instruments. Currently it is sold only in Great Britain, but anybody willing to pay £ 599 (about $1200) can order one fromdolphinmusic.co.uk.

Innovation: Web-only app stores just about any kind of content and allows you to share it with anyone.Zoho Notebook

Benefit: More full-featured than competing online tools.

AdventNet's Zoho tools include everything from wiki software to customer relations management and project management applications, many of them free.Zoho Notebook(free, in public beta) continues the winning streak. You can enter text, graphics, audio, video, and embedded content from other sites onto your notebook's pages--or use the page as a single word processing document or spreadsheet. Put together everything on a certain subject, and you're ready to share your work with online compatriots.

Innovation: Band allows its fans to pay whatever amount they want for this new album, starting at zilch.

Benefit: Approach calls the bluff of illegal downloaders, who say they're happy to pay artists but not music studios.

The recording industry is desperate for new ideas about how to sell music. Radiohead's pay-what-you-want approach may not work for all acts--and the band has remained mum on reports that 62 percent of early downloaders paid nothing for the group's new album--but the strategy certainly does one thing that most music companies seem loath to do: It respects fans. And all of the voluntary fees go directly to Radiohead, not to a publisher.

Innovation: USB-speed connections without cable spaghetti.IOGear Wireless USB Hub and Adapter

Benefit: Presents none of the flakiness and proprietary technology that hobbled previous wireless USB products.

IOGear's hub and adapter are based on an industry standard that should soon be built into laptops and other devices. Setting upIOGear's Wireless USB Hub and Adapter($160) was tricky, but once we had everything arranged, our data flew, thanks to its streaming, HD-capable, 250-megabits-per-second throughput. Wireless USB will become more versatile once it's built into devices.

Innovation: Web site aggregates your financial account transaction data, alerting you to any unusual activity or to a rapidly dwindling balance.

Benefit: Takes most of the work out of keeping on top of your money.

Signing up forMintrequires a leap of faith--you must give the site the numbers and passwords for your bank and credit card accounts. But once you do, it acts as your personal-finance lackey. Mint downloads your latest transactions for all accounts and does its best to categorize them. You decide when you want to receive an alert, such as for when a bill is due, a big purchase appears on your credit card, or you just got a nice, fat deposit.

Innovative Products, Numbers 21 through 25

Innovation: Lets you use Microsoft's Silverlight platform to create Web mashups.

Benefit: Though Popfly is still in early beta, its operation is clearer and its display is more attractive than that of the similar Yahoo Pipes tool.

If you ever played with Legos as a kid, then you should be able to assemble a Web mashup inMicrosoft's Popfly. No coding know-how needed--using Popfly is as simple as choosing content sources (such as pictures, video, or news feeds from various online sources) and connecting them to a display model (such as a video player, a dynamic box for text, or a game of whack-a-mole that pops up pictures, for instance). Voil à , you have your mashup. You can embed the resulting creation in a blog entry or Web page, or just share its URL so others can admire your work.

Innovation: Delivers cheap, unlimited Internet-based calling at home through any Sprint CDMA handset.Sprint Airave

Benefit: You can use your cell phone (and all of the contacts you have stored in it) as a universal phone, with better reception, while at home.

T-Mobile was first to enhance at-home cell calling with the debut of its Hotspot @ Home service, but that offering requires use of one of the company's few dual-mode Wi-Fi/cellular handsets. Sprint's device, made by Samsung ($50 with Sprint service),creates a mini cell tower in your hometo which your phone can roam. As a result, you can enjoy more convenience and even bigger savings than what you get from VoIP providers such as Vonage.

Innovation: Melds comprehensive search results more coherently than competing universal searches do.Ask.com

Benefit: Proves that not every site needs to mimic Google, and that a venerable search engine company can do cool new stuff.

Ask.com, a compete redesign of the former Ask Jeeves site, asks very little but gives a lot via its thoughtfully designed interface, including search suggestions as you type. With one query you can retrieve traditional search results as well as news, images, blogs, video, and more. Once you've searched, you can filter the results with useful suggestions to home in on just what you were looking for. The site is visually minimalist, but you can skin it for a new look. If privacy is a concern,AskEraser wipes away private data that search engines typically store.

Innovation: Allows Excel users to share their spreadsheets, online or off.

Benefit: Melds the best of traditional office software and Web-based services.

eXpresso($80 per seat per year) adds a new twist to Web applications, offering both Web-based sharing in a standard format and tight integration with the most familiar spreadsheet application, Microsoft's Excel. Users can share spreadsheets in real time using eXpresso's service, which also allows you to restrict some users' access to certain segments of a master spreadsheet. In a nutshell, eXpresso is delivering today what Microsoft has promised that its Office suite will do in the future.

Innovation: The printers are slightly more expensive, but their ink is priced more like the no-name stuff advertised around the Web.Kodak EasyShare All-In-One Printers

Benefit: You can print cheaply without worrying that the cartridge will burst all over your printer.

Kodak's midlevel EasyShare printers(from $150) may be a bit pricier at first. But when you combine one with the company's paper-and-ink packs, you can print photos for as little as 10 cents each (according to Kodak)--about half the industry average. The printer's pigment-ink system uses one black-ink cartridge and one five-ink tank; replacing them with non-photo-specific inks directly from Kodak costs just $10 and $15, respectively. We think most people will appreciate the benefit of having one source for affordable, reliable replacement ink cartridges.

The List: Today's Most Innovative Products

Last Year's Innovations: The Keepers and the Flops

Sometimes the public embraces a product breakthrough like a long-lost friend. Other times, being innovative just isn't enough. (Remember the Apple Newton?) Maybe the company just can't find the right way to sell its idea. Or perhaps the public simply isn't ready for a new technology. With that in mind, we look back at the winners and losers among ourInnovation Award picks from last year.

Intel Core 2 Duo:Intel's Core 2 Duo line of CPUs pumped up processing while reducing power consumption--no mean feat. The company's launch in late 2007 of its 45-nanometer Penryn chips (see our first desktop review, "Desktops: Penryn PC Takes Power Prize") looks likely to extend its current lead over key rival AMD.Intel Core 2 Duo

Nintendo Wii: The wee, $250 Wii broke new ground with its innovative motion-sensing controller. Since then, the appeal of this still-hard-to-find console to casual gamers has helped it outsell the more powerful PlayStation 3.

Parallels Desktop for Mac:Apple's dual-boot software, Boot Camp, is now in Leopard--great. But who wants to reboot every time they need to switch operating systems?Parallels Version 3($80) adds Windows gaming prowess.

Sony PlayStation 3: The long-delayed introduction of the PlayStation 3 landed it in the eighth spot in our "Top 21 Tech Screwups of 2006," and the console might be the poster child for engineering overkill: Even though the original 60GB model cost $599, analysts speculated that Sony was still losing $200 on each living-room "supercomputer." The new $399 entry-level PS3 model should make the console more popular with buyers, at least.Sony PlayStation 3

Sony Reader: Last year, we were wowed by this svelte e-book reader's electronic-paper display, which delivers long battery life and exhibits no flicker. The company later improved the screen with its$300 PRS-505, but the Reader has failed to become an "iPod for books."