Technical Excellence Awards 2011

As the year draws to a close, once again, PCMag is here to designate what we consider the best in Technical Excellence (or, as we call it around the office, Tech Ex). Many of the apps, services, and cutting-edge products included here can be purchased today, will be available eventually, or may never come to market in a way we can foresee yet. Some of our Tech Ex awards also go to the underlying technologies that will power a new future of excellence online and off. If it came out after December of 2010 and knocked the socks off our analysts and editors, it's on this list.

You might think it's a no brainer that the best tech products available naturally include the most innovative and amazing technology. This is not always the case. There are plenty of mediocre to bad products that make it to market. PCMag Labs has previewed or reviewed over 2,000 products, services, and technologies this year. And, as our analysts and editors can attest, plenty of companies get it wrong.

In the 28 years that PCMag has been handing out our awards for Technical Excellence, we've seen a lot of technological breakthroughs. Some we thought would change the world yet, disappointingly, they came to nothing. Others rocked the industry and changed the way we work, play, and live. Whatever the level of success (or lack thereof), what we recognize is the potential. After all, great tech is great tech; sometimes, it's just before it's time.

Will these technologies eventually find their way to your home? Only time, implementation, and your interest will tell.

CATEGORIES:

CHIPSETS

Intel Ivy Bridge
Intel Corp., www.intel.com
The successor to Intel's Westmere and Sandy Bridge chips (both using a 32-nanometer process) will be Ivy Bridge, the first from the company going 22nm. It's also going to be the first with the truly three-dimensional Tri-Gate transistors, which our components analyst Matthew Murray said, "mark a major change in the way the industry has done things for 40 years, and could revolutionize it," especially when it reduces power consumption by 50 percent. Performance increases around 37 percent don't hurt, either.

Intel says it had to go 3D just to continue obeying Moore's Law. Tri-Gate was first invented in 2002, but it took this long for it to make it to chips in mass production.

Expect improvements to the Quick Sync Video transcoding that was first introduced with Sandy Bridge. Look for products with Ivy Bridge chips—the third generation i3, i5 and i7 CPUs—in 2012, in particular powering the second wave of Ultrabook thin-and-light laptops. Better yet, Ivy Bridge processors will work in motherboards with Sandy Bridge sockets (as long as you update your BIOS), so you can upgrade your devices with all these new features if you desire.

quad-core mobile chipsets offer a lot more than the Tegra 2, which also shipped this year. Five times more, when it comes to performance, said Matt Wuebbling, Nvidia Tegra's director of product marketing. (It actually has five cores, a fifth to handle things like playing MP3s.)

The company showed off the chip this month with impressive simulations of water, smoke, blur, damage, lighting, and textures, thanks to a 12-core GPU. A 61 percent increase in battery life is also expected in tablets with the Tegra 3 when it comes to video playback.

One possibility for the chip is to power tablets that turn into game consoles. Nvidia wants people to hook the tablet right to the TV, use their existing game controller, and enjoy some mobile gaming while becoming immobile on the couch. Nvidia states that the Tegra 3 works with Android, Windows 8, and Chrome operating systems. For a look at Tegra 3 in action, check out our review of the .

Intel Smart Connect Technology and Rapid Start Technology
Intel Corp., www.intel.com
Worried that your Web apps are being ignored by your computer? No need, if you get a new Ultrabook PC, with the forthcoming Intel Smart Connect tech inside. It promises to monitor anything that needs real-time updates, be it a social network or communication service (like Facebook, Twitter, and Web-based email). Even if your PC goes to sleep, the updates will keep on coming by waking your PC occasionally to check, so you feel like it's constantly connected. Rapid Start changes the hibernation abilities of the equipped PC, so it can come back to life from zero power state in less than six seconds.

SECURITY

is tiny, written totally in raw C code for compactness; it's so small it could fit on a 3.5-inch diskette. It connects with a gigantic database in the cloud, which helped it turn in a first-ever perfect score in PCMag's malware blocking test.

VIDEO/3D

VideoTrace
Australian Centre for Visual Technologies, www.acvt.com.au
Imagine you're a game programmer and you're watching a video or a movie. You spy a building, or a car, or just about any object that you think would be a perfect addition to your game world. You have to then meticulously build that object with 3D tools to insert in your program, right? Maybe not, if you get VideoTrace. As developer Australian Centre for Visual Technologies puts it, "a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model." That means from just a few frames of video and some quick sketches, this software can extrude enough information to make a three-dimensional version of whatever you see, no matter what the shape. A company named Punchcard will be turning VideoTrace into a commercial program, but you can sign up at its website for a beta test.

See a demonstration of VideoTrace in this YouTube video.

SEARCH

Adobe Pixel Nuggets Image Recognition
Adobe Systems Inc., www.adobe.com
You have thousands of photos. We all do. Adobe knows that better than most. Researchers there are working on a visual search feature for future image editors, which researcher Jon Brandt says uses images to locate other images with similar qualities. Click a flower and you find all the other flower pics. Draw a rectangle around a specific part of an image and it'll narrow down the search to find matches for that section. It works with landmarks, objects, people, etc., and even manages to get other image view points, finding images from the same photo session, similar or different poses.

This tech will likely make searches easier for all photo fans, and it will definitely change the lives of photo experts who no longer need to tag every image they own. Watch a demo of Adobe TV Video (with Dwight from The Office).

WIRELESS

is the first router with a 450-Mbps antenna set that works in the 5GHz band. Analyst Samara Lynn said it lives up to the hype it gets by achieving a real-world throughput of 286 Mbps on 5GHz, "an unprecedented number," according to her review. Performance on the more frequently-used 2.4GHz band was also well above average.

Why is this router a big deal? Advanced users know that setting up a secondary network with 5GHz signals is smooth sailing compared with the over-crowded 2.4GHz frequency space. Being under-crowded also adds to the 5GHz speed, making it perfect for use with video applications and other bandwidth-intensive networking.

Verizon Wireless 4G LTE
Verizon Wireless, www.verizonwireless.com
Other carriers had Long Term Evolution (LTE) first (Verizon Wireless launched its version late in 2010), but it has quickly become synonymous with wireless speed. This is because Verizon built a much more widespread network than its competitors. Major cities had the network before Verizon even had products to support it. The 4G LTE can support speeds of 5 to 12 Mbps. LTE from Verizon is now in 160 cities in the U.S., with many more markets on the way. Our tests, which were documented in our Fastest Mobile Networks 2011 story, found that indeed Verizon 4G LTE is, "much faster than other mobile Web options, with speeds that often exceed home Internet connections."

Now that there's a plethora of products that support 4G LTE, including phones, tablets, laptops, USB cards, and MiFi mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, it's the new technology of choice for mobile data use. Mobile analyst Sascha Segan said, "LTE is important not just because it's fast, but because it looks to be the nearly universal worldwide 4G standard."

ECOMMERCE

is the solution, or at least the only one to make a go of it so far. It's a combination app and service that works with PayPass readers using Near Field Communication (NFC) wireless technology and the entry of a PIN on the phone screen for security.

At present, it only works with one phone () and one type of credit card (MasterCard). And very few vendors have the PayPass reader. The market is premature but the technology is ready for expansion, hopefully soon. Here's hoping that the carriers that don't support it (like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile) don't quash Google Wallet's chances.

MOBILE APPS

Siri Voice Assistant
Apple Inc., www.apple.com
It turns out Siri wasn't originally developed in 2011; the company that created it, an offshoot of SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, started work in 2007 and Siri debuted as a personal assistant app for the iPhone in early 2010. However, Apple's ownership put Siri on the road to becoming the single most innovative voice-capable digital assistant ever seen on a smartphone.

Apple used research from DARPA and several universities, including Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, plus the voice recognition engine of Nuance Communications, to perfect Siri. Now it's integrated into iOS 5 and found only on the iPhone 4S, which makes it arguably the most useful phone assistant you can hope for. Sorry if you liked the old app, which Apple killed, but the current implementation is the best, even if .

PHOTOGRAPHY

, is a revelation to our camera analyst Jim Fisher. It's better than any optical finder on low-end digital SLR cameras and approaches the clarity available on the best range finders. This OLED device plugs into the NEX-5N's accessory port to give you eye-level, through-the-lens framing with a high resolution and high contrast ratio on a screen that's only half an inch diagonally. All that in a housing that's 1.4 by 1.1 by 1.6 inches (HWD) and weighs one ounce.

If you own a NEX-5N, you owe it to yourself to get one. Let's hope it becomes standard issue on Sony cameras going forward, and hopefully similar screens become options for other manufacturers soon.

Lytro Light Field Camera
Lytro, www.lytro.com
Taking a picture that gets all the light info possible used to take a room full of cameras connected to a supercomputer now requires just a small box. Lytro is the branding for the first "light field" camera, a image capture device with an 8x optical zoom and f/2 aperture lens. What's different is the Light Field Engine that processes every single light ray captured by the sensor—that's every "light traveling in every direction through every point in space." It creates a "living picture" with so much data inside that you can refocus the pictures right on the camera or computer. The examples on the site show that with a click, the focus can shift from foreground to background in an instant. Software on the backend makes it possible to process the light field data for these amazing new photos.

MATERIALS

World's Lightest Micro-Lattice Material
HRL Laboratories, LLC, www.hrl.com
How light is 0.9 mg/cc? It's 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. The people at HRL Laboratories know this first hand, because they created a micro-lattice structure material that weights exactly that. It's so light that it can sit on top of a dandelion and not send a seed head spinning into the air. The lattice is a structure of hollow tubes, each with walls no thicker than 100 nanometers, creating a product with an ultra-low density, yet able to bounce back from major stress and strain. Likely uses for the material, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) helped fund, include dampening sound, vibration and shock, and use on future battery electrodes.