State of the Art
Brilliant Ideas That Found a Welcome
By DAVID POGUE
Published: December 28, 2006

It may take a village to raise a child, but that’s a trivial task compared with the act of bringing a new electronic gadget to market.

lllustration by Stuart Goldenberg

Marketers determine what the masses want, product managers guide the design, engineers bring the thing to life — it’s a lot of cooks. No wonder so many people across the country are, at this very moment, staring at newly unwrapped electronic holiday gifts in utter bewilderment.
Even so, brilliant ideas sometimes make it off the drawing board, past the layers of lawyers and onto store shelves. Sometimes, a delicious idea is part of a triumphant overall product. Other times, the flash of greatness is wasted on a turkey.
Here, then, is my second annual Top 10 List — not of the greatest tech products of the year, but of the greatest ideas, individual features, that surfaced. It’s a little tip o’ the egg nog to the great thinkers whose ideas made it out of committee.

THE FLASH-DRIVE FUEL GAUGE You gotta love those U.S.B. flash drives. They’re cheap, shiny and tiny, and they offer a practically perfect way to transport computer files.
On the other hand, you gotta hate it when you plug in a flash drive to receive a file you need — and discover that the darned thing doesn’t have enough free space.
That’s the beauty of ,

Lexar’s Mercury flash drive, whose case has a “fuel gauge” — a bar graph that tells you, without even plugging the thing in, how full it is. Thanks to a technology called E-Ink, this graph is always on and stays visible indefinitely, without requiring any power whatsoever.

THE MAGNETIC POWER CORD Somewhere there’s surely a support group for people who have dragged their $2,000 laptops to the floor by tripping on the power cord.
That doesn’t happen with Apple’s 2006 laptops, whose power cords connect with a powerful magnet rather than a pin or a plug. If someone trips or yanks on the cord, the magnet detaches and drops harmlessly to the floor. The laptop switches seamlessly to battery power, saving your data, your money and months of therapy.
Better yet, this magnet has no “right side up”; it works no matter which way you slap it on. Oh, and it lights up to confirm that you’re plugged into a working outlet.

THE TWO-STAGE FLASH It may seem counterintuitive that the more expensive the digital camera, the less likely it is to have a built-in flash. The manufacturers assume that if you’re that much of a professional, you certainly own an external flash unit.
Among other virtues, an external flash can be aimed upward so the light bounces off the ceiling, rather than blasting into your subject’s face. The result is more even and flattering light.

Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-L1 and LC1 cameras, though, offer the best of both worlds. If you push the open button for the built-in flash firmly, it pops up and faces forward.
But if you push lightly, it pops up to a different position, angled 45 degrees upward — yes, in bounce-off-the-ceiling position. Great idea, cleverly done.

A RECORD RADIO BUTTON Samsung Helix is a regular music player, like an

iPod (though smaller). But it’s also an XM satellite radio receiver.
That’s already a good idea, but here’s the clincher: When you hear a song that you like on one of XM’s 70 themed, ad-free music channels, one button-press records that song from the beginning — even if you were a little late hitting record. In all, this gadget can hold about 25 hours’ worth of recorded radio.
Long-suffering music fans could probably have predicted that XM would be sued over this glorious idea, and, well, sure enough. Maybe what’s so great about this idea isn’t so much its ingenuity as its bravery.

MUSIC BEAMING The Zune,

Microsoft’s new music player, does something amazingly well that its rival, the iPod, doesn’t do at all: It lets you beam songs or photos wirelessly to another Zune. It’s easy and fast, and it could be a great way to discover new music recommended by your friends.
In practice, there’s more to the story. To avoid lynch mobs from the record companies, Microsoft designed the Zune so that beamed songs self-destruct after three plays or three days, whichever comes first — even, idiotically, your own recordings like college lectures and garage-band demos.
The Zune, therefore, is that classic case: a killer idea diluted by a ham-handed execution.

THE VIDEO-GAME WORKOUT Nintendo’s Wii game console, on the other hand, is a stellar product that succeeds precisely because its central idea is unencumbered by corporate baggage — and is tons of fun.
The masterstroke is its wireless controller, which detects the motion of your arm in three dimensions and in real time. As you swing, jab or whap through the air, your animated character on the TV screen swings the corresponding baseball bat, tennis racquet, fishing rod and so on.
(Perhaps it’s a bit much to suggest that this video game may actually help to address America’s problem of sedentary youth. But my own two in elementary school play the Wii’s tennis doubles game nightly with full-body vigor — and are perspiring after half an hour.)

THE TRACKPEARL On most

BlackBerry cellphones, you scroll through on-screen choices using a side-mounted thumb wheel. Too bad if you’re a lefty or if you’re trying to move horizontally across the screen.
The tiny and terrific BlackBerry Pearl solves both problems neatly: it has a front-mounted trackball. This ball is also clickable, so you can scroll to something and then select it with a single quick thumb flick.
And because this trackball is pearly white, translucent and illuminated, it nests neatly with the phone’s name and concept. A pearl, indeed.

THE FACE FINDER Several 2006 Canon cameras, including the image-stabilized SD800IS, offer face-recognition software. In this mode, the camera identifies human features in a scene, even in group photos. Little rectangles appear around each face (up to nine in a scene) as you view the back-panel screen; these little rectangles move around, tracking your subjects as they shift.
The point of all this is to calculate focus and exposure properly for portraits. The facial recognition eliminates shots in which, for example, the camera locked its focus on something in the background. And it forces the flash to throttle way back to avoid blasting nearby faces into whiteness.

POINT WITHOUT POINTING The speech-recognition software in Windows Vista offers anyone who can’t type — or doesn’t like to — a slick, efficient alternative. Wearing a headset, you can dictate text into any program and “click” any button or tab by saying its name.
But what if you don’t know its name? What if it’s some cryptic little toolbar icon? You can’t exactly say, “Click the little thing that looks like a watermelon seed on two beach balls.”
What you can say, though, is “show numbers.” The program immediately overlays every clickable thing on the screen with colorful numbers. You can just say “21” (or whatever) to click the corresponding spot — a trick that works especially well for navigating Web pages.

THE UNCOMPLICATED CELLPHONE Plenty of people have, while grousing to their spouses, imagined a cellphone that does nothing but make phone calls — no Internet, camera, music, text messaging, or any other complicated gimmickry. In other words, it’s not such a new idea.
GreatCall, however, has actually gone and built one. Its Jitterbug phone is a big finger-friendly flip phone with huge light-up number buttons, no nested menus at all, and — get this — a simulated dial tone.
Any big-name cell carrier can beat this phone on price, network coverage and, of course, features. But for the aging technophobe, this one’s an idea that works.

A SPARKLING YEAR The truth is, you could fill 20 more columns with all the good ideas that popped up this year. For now, though, here’s a toast to the dreamers who thought up these delicious twists — and the committees that let them through.