Sony Walkman rated as King of Gizmos

The compact and subtle gizmo to the aid of the music lovers has bagged the center stage yet again as the original Sony Walkman has been crowned by the PC World magazine as the greatest gadget of the past 50 years.

The £ 120 player, launched in 1979, "virtually invented personal electronics" according to PC World magazine edges out its modern-day descendent, Apple’s iPod, for top billing in a list of the 50 best gadgets for the past 50 years.

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."

The magazine listed the most significant gizmos rated for usefulness, design, innovation and influence on subsequent gadgets, as well as coolness.

"We’d be lost without these things. The rules were that the devices had to be relatively small and we considered only those items whose digital descendants are covered in PC World like cameras and not things like blenders," a spokesperson for PC World said.

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. Palm pilot 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).