Down the Dumper: Nokia N8 and HD DVD out in Greatest Gadget first round

The first round of voting in our joyous Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century tournament is over. There have been winners. There have been losers. There have been some nail-bitingly close contests and there have been some comically one-sided drubbings.

Most surprisingly, the Nokia N8 received a surprisingly thorough pasting at the hands of the Pioneer Kuro TV, with Nokia fanboys failing to come to the smart phone's rescue. It secured a dismal 22 per cent of the vote.

The most noble defeats of all were endured by the humble USB key and the 3G dongle. Pitted against the Nintendo Wii and BlackBerry Bold 9700 respectively, these tiny marvels each managed to secure an impressive 46 per cent of the vote. It's enough to get you misty-eyed, so it is.

Pounded most severely of all were the valiant Sony Walkman HD5, LG GD910 Watch Phone and Toshiba XE1 HD DVD player. They could muster just 9 per cent of the vote in their matches against some real tech Goliaths: the HTC Desire HD, PlayStation 3 and Sony S470 Blu-ray player respectively. Its seems HD DVD will never beat Blu-ray, to the indescribable chagrin of our very own Ian Morris.

Robosapien and the JVC Everio camcorder received only slightly less severe wedgies. They amassed a mere 11 per cent of the vote in their respective duels against the mighty iPhone and Xbox 360. The Canon EOS 300D digital SLR didn't do much better, winning only 31 per cent of the vote in its death match against the Nintendo DS.

A sizeable portion of other contenders failed to muster more than 30 per cent of the votes in their clashes. Among them, Virgin V+HD was given an agonising kick in the shins by Sky+HD, Panasonic's Lumix TZ-series cameras were subjected to a brutal Chinese burn by the iPad, and the iconic Motorola Razr was clotheslined into oblivion by the MacBook Pro.

Similarly, the iMac bodyslammed the Flip Video mini-camcorder through the commentators' table, the iPod classic walloped the Sony PSP round the bonce with a folded chair, and the Amazon Kindle leapt off the turnstile on to the Asus Eee netbook's plastic carcass. The Alienware M11x gaming laptop was sent hurtling off a cliff by the TomTom Go Live sat-nav.

Join us next week as we bid more gadgets adieu on their journey down the dumper, and don't forget to vote in the second round of the tournament, which is open now. Let us know in the comments section below -- or on our Facebook page -- if you feel justice hasn't been done in any of the aforementioned duels to the death.

• Excited about round two? Then make sure you head over to our Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century tournament page to vote for your champion.
• Every time you vote, you'll be entered into a draw to win an Arcam rCube, a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and a MiFi from Three or one of ten Idapt i4 multi-gadget chargers.