Year in review: From iPhone to Kindle

This year was bookended by two very high-profile gadget announcements--the iPhone (of course), and the Kindle e-book reader from Amazon.com.

While Apple's phone is a runaway success, Amazon still has to prove that its stab at the electronic book market will resonate better with readers than past attempts in the industry.

The breathless anticipation leading up to the iPhone launch was unlike anything ever seen in the consumer electronics industry, as Apple entered an entirely new (to it, at least) segment of the hardware business. Conversely, Apple's set-top box, AppleTV, failed to find as many excited fans.

A gadget that didn't get released also had the gadget world buzzing. The Foleo, created by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins, was intended to be a mini laptop purely for sending e-mail, but the company pulled the plug on the device, or at least the first version of it, before it even had a chance to get in front of consumers.

Combined with Palm's failure to make any significant updates to its Treo smart phone or its respected Palm OS, the Foleo's premature cancellation caused many in the tech world to wonder whether Palm had hit "rock bottom."

The next-generation DVD battle intensified this year. Though it appeared that Blu-ray was winning the war with consumers, the sudden defection of Paramount Studios and DreamWorks Animation to the HD DVD camp caused quite a stir and included accusations that the studios were convinced to lend their support with monetary compensation.

As both sides cranked up their marketing machines, prices on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc players dropped significantly. LG Electronics introduced a combo player intended to offer consumers a compromise, but its price--more than the cost of buying one HD DVD player and one Blu-ray--kept many buyers away. And it turns out that many home video watchers are just fine watching plain old DVDs.

Though consumers haven't bought into the idea of high-definition discs wholesale yet, they have been eager to jump on the HDTV bandwagon. Sales of flat-panel sets soared this year as prices dropped fast--too fast for some manufacturers and retailers.

One TV manufacturer in particular took the industry by storm this year: California-based Vizio clawed its way into the lead as the biggest supplier of LCD TVs in the U.S. in the second quarter. In doing so, it shoved aside electronics heavyweights like Samsung, Sharp, and Sony, due in large part to its strategy of selling through club stores such as Sam's Club and Costco.

LCD manufacturers' ability to produce panels cheaply and scale them quickly led to the rise of liquid crystal as the display of choice by most consumers. But near the end of 2007, it appeared plasma was staging a comeback. Renewed research on the technology and cheaper technology could lead to a fresh round of interest in plasma TVs in the next year.