Help Us Choose the Top 100 Products, Get a Chance at an iPod Touch

It may well be the most venerable tradition here at PC World: For 25 years now, we've given out annual awards for the year's best products in an array of categories. Our picks for the 100 Best Products of the Year will appear in the July print issue, and on the site in late May. But we're rounding up contenders right now, and we need your help.

Hop over to www.pcworld.com/bestproducts and you can vote on your favorite products, choosing from hundreds of nominees in categories such as PCs, Web sites, software, and peripherals. The collective wisdom of everyone who votes will determine a list of 100 favorite products as choosen by the PC World community. (We editors will pick our 100 favorites, too. We're assuming there will be lots and lots of overlap...)

Need an added inducement to chime in? When you vote, we'll enter you in a drawing for a snazzy iPod Touch.

Two additional notes on all this:

Why is PC World choosing the best products of 2008 when the year is just getting started? Glad you asked. For many years, we timed our awards tabulation so we could give out trophies at PC Expo, a gigantic trade show in New York. PC Expo is no longer gigantic--well, actually, it's completely defunct. But we've never felt like messing up a good thing by fiddling with the timing of the awards--they're one of the most popular things we publish online and in print. Feel free to call them "The 100 Best Products at This Particular Moment in Time" if you choose.

We let folks vote in our very first awards and gave away a prize then, too. Our September 1983 issue reported on the results of what was then called the World Class PC contest. And we gave away a whopper of a prize--an IBM PC with a color monitor, a printer, and a cornucopia of software (Zork I! Zork II! Zork III!). That 1983 PC was worth $14,000--which, even before you adjust for inflation, is a heckuva lot more than the value of the iPod Touch we're giving away this year.

But consider this: The Touch has a vastly more powerful processor, a higher-resolution (albeit smaller) screen, and 125,000 times as much memory. If you'd had one in 1983--when pocket-sized computing devices tended to look like this--it would have been awfully impressive. The Touch has Wi-Fi; the 1983 PC made do with an external modem (I'm not sure if it was 300-bps or a zippy 1200-bps). And while the keyboards IBM manufactured in the 1980s remain impressive to this day, I'm fairly sure the 1983 PC lacked the Touch's multi-touch screen and built-in accelerometer.

Okay, enough footnotes. Please cast your votes for the best products of the year. Better yet, encourage all your friends to do so, too. We can't wait to report on the results...