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World Class: Best of 2003

The gear of the year: your complete guide to 50+ hardware, software, and service winners--including today's number one product.

By PC World Editors   

Complete Coverage

Staying Connected

Wireless Phone

Samsung SPH-i500 ($500-$600, depending on carrier and plan)

In a year when many vendors tried to graft PDAs onto their cell phones, Samsung hit the jackpot with its pioneering SPH-i500 Palm-based CDMA phone. This sleek, silvery clamshell is the first PDA/phone we've seen that manages to keep a true cell-phone profile (previous attempts were too large) without sacrificing usability on the PDA side (helped considerably by the crispness of its inevitably smallish 65,000-plus-color screen). You have to live without a few extras such as a Secure Digital memory-card slot, but that's a small sacrifice to make if it gains you this otherwise fabulous balancing act.

Router/Gateway

Linksys WRT54G ($130)

Little by little, Wi-Fi (802.11) wireless networking is taking over the world. If you're ready to invest in a Wi-Fi router, we recommend an 802.11g model. This new standard is compatible with the pervasive 802.11b spec--but if you set up an all-11g network, you'll zip along about four times faster than 11b can sustain.

Our pick, Linksys's WRT54G, packs 802.11g's speed into the company's signature blue-and-black case. The unit is easy to install and contains a solid firewall. Like all current 802.11g routers, the WRT54G used a preliminary version of the spec at press time. The final standard should be approved by the time you read this, at which point a free download will bring the model up-to-date.

Web Browser

Mozilla 1.3 (free)

The browser wars may be over, but browser innovation isn't. For five years, the open-source community has hacked away on Mozilla, a free program that is now stable, speedy, standards-compliant, and full of useful features. Unlike Internet Explorer, Mozilla blocks pop-ups with a built-in tool, manages cookies and passwords site-by-site, and includes both an IRC chat client and a powerful mail reader with intelligent spam filtering. You can surf multiple sites in one tabbed browser window (as you can in Opera, another alternative Web browser we like).

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