The Best Inventions Of The Year

From the phone that has changed phones forever, to futuristic cars, to a building made of water, to a remote-controlled dragonfly—a dazzling display of ingenuity

By Maryanne Murray Buechner, Kristina Dell, Andrea Dorfman, Lev Grossman, Anita Hamilton, Rebecca Winters Keegan, Jeffrey Kluger, Michael D. Lemonick, Coco Masters, Lisa McLaughlin, Alice Park, Julie Rawe and Deirdre van Dyk

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Mobile media mavens have the iPhone. For serious e-mail addicts, there's the Blackberry Curve. Both are beautiful—and expensive. For the rest of us, there's the Palm Centro ($99 with two-year Sprint contract). It has all the features you need in a smart phone: qwerty keyboard for Web browsing (Google Maps!), e-mail and text messaging, plus a memory slot and a 1.3-megapixel camera.
palm.com/centro

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