But what stands out most in 2005 are individual products or ideas, few of them breakthroughs, but each representing a noteworthy and needed extension of existing tools.

* Apple's iPod Nano carries on the company's tradition of sleek, expensive products whose design defines a category. The slim, powerful Nano uses flash memory instead of a spinning hard disk to house either 2 gigabytes or 4 gigabytes of music or photos (and check that slick color screen).

* Microsoft's Xbox 360 wins kudos from many gamers for its high-quality video. But the snazzily designed game box is also an interesting play on home networking, feeding digital media files on your PC into your TV. On that score, the new Xbox begins to pay off on the promise of networked digital devices throughout the home.

* Anti-spyware programs, alas, are still necessary. Two of the best are Sunbelt CounterSpy (www.sunbeltsoftware.com) and Webroot's Spy Sweeper (www.webroot.com). Yes, you're sapping PC performance when you enable real-time monitoring, but keeping the bad guys out is simply de rigueur on today's computing scene.

* Google is everywhere, but its best idea for 2005 was Google Earth. Tapping databases of satellite and aerial imagery, the program offers dazzling views at varying levels of detail of almost every place on the planet. And watching the online community turn geographic data into useful maps to aid hurricane relief was inspirational. See earth.google.com. But where are the Mac and Linux versions?

* Tagging emerged as a fascinating and socially beneficial activity in 2005, as in those Google maps referred to above. Letting users attach keywords to photos or bookmarks makes it easier to find what you're looking for. See Flickr.com for an example of how digital photos can be turned into searchable slideshows, and check Technorati (www.technorati.com) for tag-based Weblog searching.

* Sports fans need friends with a Slingbox. The $250 device (slingmedia.com) hooks up to a set-top box and beams TV through the Internet to any PC. Supposing my Cardinals will be in San Francisco, a local Giants fan could beam the game to me in Redbird-starved Raleigh. (This is a hint to my Bay-area son.)

* Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) seems like a dumb idea: Let anyone contribute to any article, and grow an amateur encyclopedia one line at a time. But the magazine Science found Wikipedia to be surprisingly accurate, and some people think an evolving online repository may become a model for open-source reference collections.

* Podcasting is doing something similar for radio. If you're tired of what's on the dial, try one of the thousands of podcasts that ship homemade audio around the Internet. Like Weblogs, podcasts are challenging traditional media with lively personal audio free of corporate restraints.

* Skype turned Internet telephony into a major story in 2005, offering free calling to other Skype users and a low-cost option for connections to land and cellphone lines. Now it's branching into mobile phones, and proving that you don't have to be a fast typer to stay in touch via your PC. Get the software at www.skype.com.

* I still like Palm's $450 Treo 650, a merger of telephone with PDA in a slick package that includes a surprisingly usable keyboard. If you're a heavy PDA user like I am, the ability to carry contacts, calendar, e-books, notes and telephone in a single instrument is a powerful draw.

* Why has it taken so long to get good desktop search tools? Apple's OS X version 10.4 adds Spotlight, a speed demon that finds anything you've lost on your hard disk in the blink of an eye. Windows users can pick up Google's free desktop tool (desktop.google.com), but should also consider Copernic's nifty offering (www.copernic.com).

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