50 Top 10 Lists of 2007
Top 10 Gadgets — #1. Apple iPhone — The iPhone changed the way we think about how mobile media devices should look, feel and perform. The design is exceptional inside and out: It's got a slick glass-and-stainless steel case and an elegant touch screen loaded with eye candy.
Context & Ripple Effects
Time's gadget list closes out a year that opened with the iPhone's June launch, when reviewers already framed the device as a glimpse of the future. Naming it the top gadget of 2007 converts that early critical consensus into an official year-end verdict, six months into the product's life.
The ranking also lands amid growing pains the praise glosses over: by mid-July the device's appetite for Wi-Fi had knocked out dozens of access points at Duke University, a headache for network administrators that showed how differently the iPhone consumed campus networks than the phones it displaced.
First-order effects
- Apple ends 2007 with the year's definitive design endorsement, reinforcing the glass-and-stainless-steel, touch-screen-first template the June reviews had already singled out.
Second-order effects
- Rival handset makers face a benchmark problem: Time's criteria — look, feel, touch screen — reward industrial design rather than feature checklists, pressuring competitors' next hardware cycles toward similar touch-driven forms.
- Institutions running Wi-Fi networks absorb new costs, as the Duke episode shows enterprise and campus administrators having to re-engineer access points around a consumer phone's traffic patterns.
Third-order effects
- Year-end listmaking itself becomes a scoreboard for the shift from phones-as-phones to phones-as-media-devices, with mainstream outlets rather than trade press now arbitrating which device defines the era.
The trend: 2007's gadget canon is consolidating around the touch-screen smartphone as the default form factor for mobile media devices.