For better or much worse, Best of CES award winners this century

The Best of CES 2012 award went to LG for its 55EM9800 OLED TV. The highlights were the absolute black level performance, an ultrafast panel, and excellent viewing angles in  this 4mm thick frame. Plus, there's no need for backlighting.

2011 winner: Motorola Xoom. In a show that featured tablets, this one came out on top of the pack. The Xoom was powered by Android Honeycomb on hardware that included a dual-core processor, 4G-compatibility, HDMI out, and front- and back-facing cameras.

But things didn't pan out for Motorola and the Xoom. First year sales were very disappointing as this tablet couldn't crack the dominance of Apple's iPad and the quick technological advances going on. You could tell it was going downhill by its sales price. Originally sold for around $800 when it was released in Feb. 2011, it could be bought for $200 just a year later.

2010 winner: 3D HDTV was the theme and Panasonic was the big winner with its first-ever attempt at 3D televisons. More important was Panasonic's decision to require the viewer to wear 3D glasses to view the content. This was another first for the industry.

2010 Best in Show and People's Voice Award winner: The Palm Pre, along by the new PalmOS took the award for the innovative way it interacted with the user and by its ability to organize. It allowed multitasking and it pulled all your personal information from various sources.

The Pre hit the market in June, 2010 and was a smash hit with its Sprint version selling 50,000 units on the first day and 100,000 units in the first week. But it was all downhill from there as diappointing sales begam the first week of July. It was replaced less than a year later by the Palm Plus.

2006 winner: The Creative Vision Zen:M  music player was slated to be an iPod killer with a brighter screen, better battery life, a voice recorder and an FM tuner, the $330, and  30GB storage. And look at those colors.

2007 winner: The first combination HD DVD-Blu-ray player, the LG BH100, took the grand prize at the height of the war between the two video playback formats. Unfortunately for those who bought this one at $1,200 -- HD DVD was soon declared the loser so a combo player lost its usefulness except for those who liked to watch old movies.

2006 winner: The Creative Vision Zen:M  music player was slated to be an iPod killer with a brighter screen, better battery life, a voice recorder and an FM tuner, the $330, and  30GB storage. And look at those colors.

2005 winner: Samsung's 67-inch DLP HDTV won because it was the biggest DLP set at the show. It could handle 1080p and was considered to be thin and light, and twice as sharp as previous models. And it was relatively inexpensive.

2004 winner: The 45-inch LCD screen on the Sharp Aquos LC45GD1U was the largest LCD flat panel on the planet at the time. The 1,920x1,080 pixels allowed HDTV content to be played in its native resolution, unlike comparable-sized plasma TVs.

2003 winner: Hitachi G1000 Multimedia Communicator Pocket PC. Here's another bomb. The Pocket PC was "the first Windows-powered PDA/phone hybrid with a built-in keyboard, a digital camera, and an Intel 400MHz XScale processor," according to CNET.

The G1000 wasn't released until summer 2003 which gave competitors an opportunity to introduce their smaller devices and make this look like an outdated monster from the 1980s.

2002 award: The theme of this show was high-end audio systems. Designed to drive any speaker available at the time, Halcro's DM68 Super Fidelity Monobloc amplfiers were rated at 225 watts per channel and designed to drive any speaker available at the time.

2002 award: The theme of this show was high-end audio systems. Designed to drive any speaker available at the time, Halcro's DM68 Super Fidelity Monobloc amplfiers were rated at 225 watts per channel and designed to drive any speaker available at the time.

2001 winner: DataPlay discs. It was hoped that this tiny 500MB storage device could replace the CD as a DataPlay disc could store 5 hours of music vs. 1 hour on a 650MB CD.

 How quickly things change from year to year. The main problems of DataPlay discs were its price and the damage it caused to MP3 players. Its DRM prevented a user from deleting the content it downloaded onto an MP3 device. Once content was transferred to an MP3 player, it became permanent. It was called one of the worst gadgets of 2002.

2000 prize: CyberGenie from Cygnion Corp was a cordless phone system that used 2.4GHz digital spread spectrum radio technology and speech recognition to manage the communications for a SOHO (if you remember what that is) or small business. It could assist up to 20 users.

The basic package included a base station, one cordless handset and "CyberGenie@Work" software at a cost of $499.