Gadgetory

history is filled with brilliant ideas that change the world and every one of them must have sounded like the ravings of a lunatic atomic energy space travel the George Foreman grill but with enough time these bold visions took root and shaped the everyday world we live in today the same is true for all the great technology we use in our daily lives Donald Bell and in this top 5 I'm counting down the great unsung gadgets that pave the way for the world of tech we take for granted today starting off at number 5 you Sega Dreamcast in a year that will launch both the Xbox one and the PlayStation 4 it seems only right to trace things back to the Dreamcast released in 1998 this was the first console to render games with full frames the first with a built-in modem for online play and that candy-colored for button controller looks pretty familiar 15 years after its debut you can still see the influence of Sega's Dreamcast in today's consoles unfortunately for Sega it was the last console they ever built at number 4 the Logitech photo man also known as the die cam model 1 this was the first practical all-in-one digital camera sold to the public released in 1990 with an early adopters price tag of 995 dollars the photo man boggles the mind with its ability to store up to 32 photos that you could transfer directly to your computer and upload to your ugly awful geo city's home page for those of you who could afford one it was like holding the future of photography in your hands I mean yeah the resolution was like a postage stamp and the thing only shot in black and white but in a time where digital cameras are now embedded in every gadget you own you have to give props to the photo man I give it one year before they're selling replicas of this thing at Urban Outfitters now a real dinosaur comes in at number three the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x the first cellular phone anyone could go out and actually buy anyone with $4,000 at least released in 1984 the DynaTAC offered 30 minutes of talk time and can store a whopping 30 phone numbers your kids may be surprised to know this but in the 80s people actually use their phones for talking like conversations with their mouths nothing said baller like holding this brick up to your face and acting important but if you really want to trace back the paternity of the smartphone in your pocket look no further than number two the Palm Pilot it was the poem that really popularized the idea of the PDA no gross personal digital assistant the Palm Pilot 1000 made its debut in 1996 and with it you can store your calendar appointments your contacts memos and a to-do list features that are still at the core of any modern smartphones but the real groundbreaking feature of the Palm Pilot was that you could connect it up to your computer and sync your data we take it for granted now that our desktop and our mobile calendars and our contacts all synchronized magically but it was Palme who was really the first to make that magic happen seriously stop so how do you top the Palm Pilots influence on our mobile craze state of technology well coming at number one Web TV you didn't see that one coming did you washed in 1996 the web TV set-top box allowed anyone with a phone line to put the Internet on their home TV the Web TV did more than just predict today's current Smart TV trend and the connected living room it was also the first device that grasped the idea that if you remove the complexity of the desktop computer and give people a straightforward way to get online and check their email you could reach a huge audience today with the sales of desktops and laptops falling off and more people picking up tablets and phones to get online web TV's vision for a simpler more affordable way to jump onto the web has ultimately won out so there you go five trailblazing technologies that deserve credit for shaping today's gadget build landscape but if you disagree or have some other worthy nominations you can give me a shout on Twitter or better yet head over to top-5 cnet.com leave a comment watch some more videos until you're properly in a full-on rage donald bell thanks for watching