1. Apple iPad 2
Thinner, lighter and more powerful than its predecessor, the mighty iPad 2 easily sustained its reign as the king of tablets this year. Though the competition has heated up a bit with the introduction of a fleet of touchscreen rivals that run on Google's Android operating system, Apple's latest wonder, which starts at $499, has the best apps and interface, and the sheer enormousness of the company's mind-share has made the concept of tablet computing synonymous with the iPad.
2. Galaxy Nexus by Samsung
In the Android-vs.-iPhone war, the new Galaxy Nexus packs a wallop. The first phone to come loaded with Android 4.0 (code name: Ice Cream Sandwich), the Galaxy Nexus, which costs $300 with a two-year contract, is easier to use than previous Android phones. It also features a spacious 4.65-in. display with impressive 720-pixel HD resolution, an ultrafast Verizon 4G LTE wireless connection, gentle curves for a more comfortable grip and a near-field communication chip so you can pay for things with a wave of your phone. The iPhone had better watch its back.
3. Amazon Kindle Fire
With the $199 Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon flexes its retail muscle and once again proves it's the master of the impulse purchase. E-books are still nice to read on the Kindle, but the new version comes with a color screen built for movies and TV shows and can also play music and other content from Amazon's vast collection. Download your purchases with minimal fuss or store them in the cloud for instant streaming.
4. Apple iPhone 4S
Although many techies were more than a little disappointed in October when Apple unveiled something other than the totally revamped iPhone 5 they'd been speculating about for so long, the iPhone 4S continued to do what iPhones before it have done best: sell well. The processor got even nimbler, the camera is much better, and the intelligent voice-controlled assistant, Siri, has legions of iPhone owners conversing with their handsets. The iPhone 4S, which starts at $199 with a two-year contract, added Sprint to Apple's mobile footprint, which now covers three of the four biggest carriers.
5. Nintendo 3DS
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Nintendo's bringing 3-D gaming to the masses is that it managed to do so without making players wear goofy glasses. The stereoscopic display brings depth to the top screen on the $170 Nintendo 3DS, which uses motion and gyro sensors to incorporate the orientation of the device into games. A front-facing camera lets you see yourself, and rear-facing ones can snap 3-D photos. The 3DS can also wirelessly connect with nearby players and download new content directly.
6. Sony S Series 13-In. Laptop
Despite all the power under the hood (the fingerprint reader is pretty nifty too), the 13-in. S Series weighs in at around 3.5 lb. and measures less than an inch thick. Its expansive screen comes with really impressive 1,600-by-900-pixel resolution, unheard of in notebooks this size that start at $1,000, which helps make it the best value in midrange laptops on the market.
7. Roku LT/Roku 2 XS