Whether you read Gizmodo to gain insight into the latest “must have” gadgets, or you find yourself pining away at Best Buy for the latest tech toy, or you’re one of those “early adopters” who just has to have the latest innovation (think stereo VCRs way back in the early 80s, when they cost $2000, or CD players in the mid-80s, or the first Pentium-powered computer in 1995, or the mini USB flash drives only a year ago), Mobile Magazine’s The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time will be a must-read for you.
Here are the ground rules that were established before they got started …

• It had to have electronic and / or moving parts of some kind. Scissors count, but the knife does not.
• It had to be a self-contained apparatus that could be used on its own, not a subset of another device. The flashlight counts; the light bulb does not. The notebook counts, but the hard drive doesn’t.
• It had to be smaller than the proverbial bread box. This is the most flexible of the categories, since gadgets have gotten inexorably smaller over time. But in general we included only items that were potentially mobile: The Dustbuster counts; the vacuum cleaner doesn’t.

So, what are / were your favourite gadgets of all time? The now ubiquitous cell phone? Or, how about going back a few years to the advent of pop music when the Sony TR-63 transistor radio came on the scene, a gadget that was instrumental in spreading the gospel of rock ’n roll to all teens?