MW2005--Macworld Best of Show Awards, Our Take

Friday Macworld Magazine announced its Best of Show Awards for Macworld Expo SF 2005. The products are: iPod Shuffle, Mac mini, ATI Radeon X800 Mac Edition, TextWrangler 2.0, Solio, Elektron, SmartDeck, Close Combat: First to Fight, Transmit 3, Popcorn, naviPlay and the Phaser EX7750. See this MacCentral web page for details. Macworld Magazine and MacCentral are owned by IDG, the Macworld Expo producer.

We don't think anyone would disagree with the first two items--we certainly don't. We also give very high marks to the ATI Radeon X800, Griffin SmartDeck, Elektron and MacPlay's Close Combat: First to Fight as the best, respectively, graphics card, iPod accessory, Wi-Fi software and new 3D game--although MacPlay's game is not out yet, but neither is the Mac mini. If Doom 3 had been there, we probably would have picked it based on pre-release reviews alone. We would also highlight Micromat's DiskStudio as a software utility, LANDesk as network software, SMART Board as the best educational technology, NewSoft's Presto! BizCard Reader 5 as a business productivity solution (hardware and software combined), Apple's Pages as a productivity application and PocketMac for Blackbird 3.0 for as PDA software. [Bill Fox]