04 Jun 10

Stuff magazine's Cool List 2010 will give you i fatigue

An iPod dock, iPhone app and, of course, the Apple iPad have made it on to a list of the hippest gadgets of 2010.

Apple has shown it is at the core of cool, with its iPad described by judges as ‘simply the most fun gadget we’ve used this year’. Top of the list is the £300 GenevaSound S iPod dock, which experts – rather confusingly – called a ‘hi-fi slab of lifestyle conversation piece’.

The gadgets featured in Stuff magazine’s annual Top 15 Cool List, which is based on quality rather than sales, functionality or price. The list ‘isn’t about the big-brand, budget-busting gadgets that most people have’, said Stuff editor-in-chief Fraser Macdonald. Although the results proved a bit of an iFest, it didn’t all go Apple’s way. The Android-based HTC Legend was named this year’s coolest phone for being a ‘stylish super-soldier’ competitor to the iPhone. Dyson’s bladeless fan came third and was hailed a ‘lustworthy exemplar of 21st-century design and an object of mystery and intrigue’.

But look out for ‘augmented reality’, a term for adding visual effects to a real object or place. It is at No.5 and is predicted to be the ‘next big thing’.