. . . continued from Hot News
Here then are our picks for the top ten best Hardware & Software products for 2005. For busy business people interested in making the most of their time and energy, you can't go wrong with these products. All of these products are available at great prices throughout the holiday shopping season.
Top Ten Hardware Picks for 2005 — as selected by Kickstartnews Managing Editor Howard Carson
- Best Game Console — Xbox 360 The state of the art in console gaming and a darn fine little entertainment center too. What's it doing on this list? All work and no play makes Jack (and Jane) cranky! US$399. Read the review here: Xbox 360
- Best Music Player — iPod Nano Apple continues to innovate, creating form factors (physical dimensions matched perfectly to a set of feature and functions) that work better than anything else on the market. Sound and functionality are unmatched. US$199.
- Best Portable Multimedia Device — iPod Video Double the size of the Nano, a small but crystal clear and razor sharp screen, and tens of gigabytes of storage space. Music listening, video watching and a marvelous world clock and PDA. Not quite as versatile as the Sony PSP, but it's also much smaller and far more portable. US$299.
- Best Smartphone — Treo 650 Smartphone Excellent phone, top-nothc PDA, music player, still camera and video camera - the ultimate do-it-all business tool. US$299.
- Best Digital Camera — For any camera buff who hasn't made the full jump from 35mm film to digital, now is the time. My picks for the best SLR are the Nikon D70s or the about to be released Nikon D200
 Great choices. If you're not a Nikon person, try the equally marvelous Canon Rebel XT. As usual, Nikon and Canon run nose-to-nose. Looking for a really amazing compact Point & Shoot digital camera? Try the Canon SD450 or SD550 models or the Nikon 7900. Amazing stuff in very small, high quality packages and at competitive prices.
- Best Digital Video Camera — I've got two favorites: The Sony Handicam DCR-PC1000 is the best choice for aspiring movie makers. Busy business users (and plenty of home users) on the other hand, should absolutely love the Panasonic PV-GS250 with it's terrific image stabilization tecnology for jitter-free and shake-free movies.
- Best Powerhouse Pure PDA — I've got two picks for you and they're absolute monster products. First, Windows Mobile Pocket PC PDA - the HP iPaq HX4700 simply blows all of the competition out of the water. Speed, a gorgeous VGA screen and a huge software bundle make this the absolute best pure PDA for business users. Second, for Palm OS devotees, the Palm LifeDrive, the first internal hard drive-equipped PDA. It does everything a laptop computer can do and includes WiFi and Bluetooth just like the iPaq. Raw speed, power, tons of software in the bundle and 4GB of hard drive storage.
- Best Backup Solution — Buffalo TerraStation NAS For all of you out there who live in constant fear of data loss, this combined automated backup solution and network area storage device is about as foolproof as you can get. It comes with 1TB of storage set up in a RAID array so you're unlikely to ever lose any data. For your business, big or small, you need this. US$799.
- Best Small Office Laser Printer — HP LaserJet 1320 By far the best small business workgroup or network laser printer we've ever seen. It's fast and just keeps going and going and going and going. It will print on darn near anything and I wouldn't even be surprised if it worked with old mashed up newspapers. I've got one and I love it. US$399. Read the review here: HP LaserJet 1320
- Best LCD Flat Panel Monitor — Dell UltraSharp 1905FP LCD For this kind of money I'd expect an average to good monitor. What Dell sells you is a brilliant, sharp, full featured monitor with great off-axis viewing and extremely quick response. US$299.
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10. Best Tool — Snagit by TechSmith US$39.95. Snagit will take screen shots to capture error messages for tech support, capture graphics from your screen to circulate, capture scrolling Web pages to save copies of site designs, articles or online receipts, and other useful captures.
9. Best Spyware Fighting Software — Webroot US$29. Webroot is a fully automatic program that keeps spyware from infesting and slowing down work computers.
8. Best All-Round Software: Open source office suite — Open Office FREE
is the ambitious and increasingly popular suite of office products that interacts successful with every major office suite, available in most languages with more on the way.
7. Best Bookkeeping/Accounting Software — Quicken US$29 to $79.99.
Quicken – it’s fantastic and once you use it it’s hard to imagine NOT using it—their tech support is absolutely atrocious though.
6. Best Web Site Program — Virtual Mechanics for Site Spinner and IMS Web Engine US$99.
Virtual Mechanics has integrated the most important aspects of web design into one program that is easy to use and understand, and is affordable. Plus, it’s Canadian!
5. Best Spam Blocking Software Suite — Blue Security
Blue Security has software and support. It sets up a community and interactivity on complaints, has a security component and apparently higher service
4. Best Data Management Software: Lifeboat US$99.
Lifeboat is a tool in a category by itself, performing data rescue and file transfer regardless of the functionality of the PC or laptop operating system.
3. Best business site translation software: NJ Star of Australia for translation software — Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) — from US$28.
The NJ Star software was started by a businessman who moved to Australia from China, so he understands east and west communication, and business needs.
2. Best online marketing tool: Web submission program — FREE
There are many web submission tools out there, this one is free and if you have a PAD (Portable Application Description) file for your software it automates a lot of it. It’s not perfect but it is very useful. If you sell software and need a PAD look here: http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/
1. Best Software 2005: Google Earth — free to US$400.
Google Earth is a mind blowing bit of software that compiles information from many sources to present the entire world in one place. If you have seen it, you know what I mean and if not, you must download it. Put aside some time to play.
