Walkman is PC World’s hottest gadget of past 50 years

TechWhack.com :Walkman is PC World’s hottest gadget of past 50 years. 2006 is just around the corner and like every year, most media channels releases some sort of a list celebrating the arrival of the New Year. PC World is one of the most recognized PC magazines around and they have just released their list of the world’s hottest gadgets launched in the last five decades.

And amazingly, Sony Walkman tops their list as the hottest gadget to hit the street in the last 50 years. The magazine noted in its statement that when Sony launched this portable audio player way back in 1979 for a hefty price of USD 200, ‘no one had ever seen anything quite like it’. We have come a long way since then and now Apple rules this portable audio player market with their iPod range of MP3 players.

Ironically, it is Sony, which is now struggling to compete against the ever-growing popularity of the Apple iPod and have even, went to the extent of launching Walkman branded mobile phones. The market is still waiting for an iPod integrated iPhone from Apple. However, they did launch a mobile phone from Motorola with iTunes integrated in it. It failed to excite the large Apple fan base though.

PC World said about the popularity of the Apple iPod: “If the Walkman is the aging king of portable media players, Apple’s iPod is prince regent.” ReplayTV and TiVo tied for the third spot in the list and they were followed by the PalmPilot 1000 PDA. The top 10 devices in the list of 50 go like this:

1. Walkman TPS-L2 (1979)
2. iPod (2001)
3. ReplayTV RTV2001 and TiVo HDR110 (1999)
5. Palmpilot 1000 (1996)
6. Sony CDP-101 CD player (1982)
7. Motorola StarTAC phone (1996)
8. Atari Computer System (1977)
9. Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera (1972)
10. M-Systems Disk-OnKey (2000).