The Most Innovative Companies in Consumer Electronics
- Apple: With the iPhone selling briskly, Apple’s App Store has produced a burst of new mobile services, as well as an incredibly easy way to sell them. Google, RIM, and the traditional wireless carriers are rushing to catch up.
- Pure Digital Technologies: Its cleverly designed Flip digital-video recorders now command more than 20% of the camcorder market.
- Hewlett-Packard: Storming the living room with its Media-Smart connected TVs, receivers, servers, and software is just one leg of HP’s growth strategy.
- Nokia: The Finnish company’s cell phones dominate the world market, and big moves with the Ovi mobile portal — and other experiments in user-generated content — point to a new future.
- Nintendo: The Wii and DS game systems have only increased the company’s utter dominance in the past year.
- Vizio: It stole flat-panel and plasma market share by underpricing its competition — and was named Wal-Mart’s electronics retailer of the year.
- Research in Motion: Pearl, Bold, Storm — RIM’s BlackBerry isn’t just for business anymore. The company continues its march into the consumer mainstream, with its own app store, à la Apple, expected to debut this month.
- Samsung: The South Korean electronics giant boasts a long list of slick gizmos.
- LG Electronics: Another quiet giant making drool-worthy products: cell phones, Blu-ray players, TVs. Look for LG’s 3G watch phone and blur-free LCD TV to be objects of desire in 2009.
- ASUS: Traditionally an under-the-covers maker of computer components, its Eee PC line defines the netbook craze by packing a large screen, keyboard, Webcam, and wireless in an elegant, ultralight package.
