Datamation Announces 2009 Product of the Year Winners

After the heaviest voting in recent years – and some tight contests – readers have selected their choices for the 2009 Datamation Product of the Year Awards. The winners scored top honors in a broad array of tech categories, from Business Laptop to PC Security, from Enterprise Linux to Office Productivity software.

Some categories saw the traditional favorite suffer an upset, like Virtualization software. Others, like Office Productivity software, saw the longtime favorite walk away with the prize (you only get one guess as to most popular Office suite).

For each of the 37 finalists, though, being included in this contest is an honor. All the nominations came from Datamation readers, a diverse group of IT professionals with firsthand knowledge of these products, most of whom use these products everyday on the job.

To be sure, it’s the ten winners who can claim bragging rights. Datamation, founded in 1957 (publishing in print for its first 40 years), has hosted its annual Product of the Year Award contest for decades – at one time readers mailed in their entries on 3x5 cards. Earning a spot on this longtime list is a feather in the cap for any tech vendor.

Note: all winners and finalists are granted permission to use the “Product of the Year” logo on their site (just specify whether you were a winner or a finalist), and to link back to this award article. Congratulations!

And now, with no further palaver, the ten winners are:

1) Business Laptop: Dell Latitude E4300

The Dell Latitude E4300 narrowly won the vote in the business laptop category, besting the Lenovo ThinkPad W700 by only a few skinny percentage points. The other finalists were the HP EliteBook 6930p and the Samsung X460-44P.

Warning: these units ain’t cheap. In a season in which the bare-bones netbook is ascending, the pricey business laptop might seem a neglected category. But these muscular units provide maximum capability, knowing that business users will spend a few bucks to get the tools they need. The HP EliteBook, for instance, claims to offer 24 hours of continuous battery life.

The winning Dell Latitude E4300 boasts a sturdy magnesium alloy build and hefty metal hinges, and includes Dell’s Control Vault secure credential management software (for peace of mind if you leave it in taxi). As an added plus for the road warrior, its back-lit keyboard helps you type even when you’re stuck on a delayed red-eye with a single dim bulb.

2) PC Security Software: McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008

PC security software remains in the spotlight as hacking attacks on personal computers grow more intense each year. We’ve just learned that there were fresh attacks on the Internet Explorer browser. (Haven’t hackers found every last hole in IE by now?)

Voting was close in the PC security category, with each of the finalists demonstrating they have their fans. While the McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008 took the trophy, it’s clear that Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 and Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2008 have faithful users.

The McAfee package earns kudos for low costs. Added pluses include the ability to scan links in IM messages, which comes in handy as malware authors seek to corrupt your text messaging. Also earning McAfee affection from users is the fact that it uses the same interface as last year.

3) Handheld Device: Apple iPhone

Is there a tech professional who does not yet have a handheld device they commune with by the minute? And a more pressing question: when will these ubiquitous devices grow so functional they make laptops obsolete?

The two devices that led the voting were the Apple iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm, with the iPhone edging out the Storm by about twenty percent. The other finalists were the Palm TX and the HP iPaq Pocket PC.

The iPhone obviously benefits from a continuing font of cultural coolness, as the handheld retains its status as the device that all the cool kids have. Also helping the iPhone’s popularity is the wildly popular Apple iPhone App store.

Here’s a list of free, must-have cool iPhone apps to download.

4) Office Productivity Software: Microsoft Office

It’s no surprise that Microsoft Office won this category. With a suite that includes standbys like Word, PowerPoint and Excel, it’s unquestionably the 500-pound gorilla in office software – and likely the most popular software on the planet, other than an Internet browser.

However, there’s more going on with this vote than a simple win-loss. More than any other category, the votes for best office software reflect seismic shifts in the tech business. Microsoft Office, installed on your hard drive as it always has been, competed against two finalists that users access over the Web, Google Docs and Zoho Docs. Software used over the Web – called software as a service, or cloud computing – is very much the coming wave. (So much so that Office itself is on its way to a browser near you.)

Adding another element to the contest, Office also attracted more votes than finalist OpenOffice, the open source – and completely free of charge – similar product.

So this category’s three-way race, with Web-based and open source products competing against a proprietary old favorite, presents a long-term challenge for Office. Its rivals are free (or close to it), and over time they’ll grow more capable. It’s up to the deeply entrenched Office to huff and puff and keep growing itself, and to continually improve to justify its considerable price tag.

5) Mobile Application: iPhone iTALK

Would you want to compete against the runaway success of the iPhone? We didn’t think so. Clearly the popularity of the iPhone (and the surging Web traffic figures for the iPhone app store) helped earn the iPhone iTalk application the victory in this category.

The iTalk, made by Griffin, is a recording app for the iPhone and the second generation iPod Touch. It’s free, with a premium version (without ads) for $4.99. Its simple interface lets you choose your sample rates and manage your existing recordings.

The iTalk fought off some stiff competition from fellow finalists inForm 2.0 for BlackBerry, xFusion Mobile and SAS for Mobile Interaction.