1. Planet iPhone.

I keep telling people that for phones, 2008 was the equivalent of 1982 for PCs–the year things really started to get interesting. The most interesting phone was unquestionably the iPhone, and the single thing that made it so interesting was its rapid transformation from a closed platform into one with thousands of third-party applications. The year wasn’t all beer and skittles for the iPhone and people who owned it–the first morning of sales was a disaster and the iPhone 3G shipped in a form that was rife with glitches. And Apple admitted mucking up the Mobile Me launch and pissed off developers and consumers with capricious, mysterious policies at its App Store. Perfect this phone ain’t. Yet it remains the most important and impressive new hardware-and-software platform since…well, the Mac.