Around this time each year, the editors at PCWorld and TechHive gather to recognize the best new tech products—the hardware, software, gadgets, and devices that had the biggest impact on the world. The process starts out casually enough, because editors get to name their favorites from their respective beats, and everything is included in the first pass.

But passions rise when the time comes to winnow what inevitably becomes a very long list to just 100 new products. There’s a fervent back and forth as the editors make their cases as to why their product should remain on the list—and someone else’s should be whacked. Staff alliances form and dissolve as editors strategize how they’ll win the day for their picks.

A list with 100 computers, smartphones, printers, cloud services, and other great products inexorably emerges over the course of a few weeks. But that’s only half the battle, because the editors must now decide the order of importance that each product holds. That came together surprisingly quickly this year—at least for the top 10 products. As for the other 90; well, let’s just say the list was settled only after great deliberation.

And here, without further ado, are our picks for the 100 best products of 2012:

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Although monochromatic E Ink e-readers make sense in many circumstances, reading in the dark is not one of them. The bedside lamp, or the overhead light in an airplane, can often be overkill, and a disturbance to other people near you. With this e-reader, you’re paying a $40 premium for the honor of having a built-in light, but the versatility that the integrated reading light offers you is well worth the extra bucks.

The GlowLight makes the Nook Simple Touch e-reader highly adaptable to your environment--and it makes Barnes & Noble the first company to truly deliver on the promise of a built-in light source. Sony tried to do so four years ago, with its Reader PRS-700, but that model’s LED lighting, while useful in a pinch, barely reached the center of the page.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight doesn't have that problem. The LED light guide sits inside the Nook’s bezel, at the top of the 600-by-800-pixel, 6-inch E Ink Pearl display. The light shines down on the display, creating a mostly evenly lit surface. The illumination runs a little brighter near the top of the screen, but not distractingly so. While testing the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight, I found that the GlowLight transformed spots I formerly considered e-reader dead zones into bona fide reading spaces, whether I was in bed reading in the dark, or sitting on a red-eye flight looking to unwind with a book without disturbing my seatmates with the too-bright overhead light.

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In its interface and its physical design, the Nook Tablet resembles the Nook Color, but it has better specs and some new software integrations. The additions are compelling; and as an e-reader, the Nook Tablet continues to excel. However, when compared against the larger array of available tablet models, the Nook Tablet suffers from some of the same weaknesses that affect the Kindle Fire.

The Nook Tablet's main weakness--like the Kindle Fire's---is that it isn't a full-featured tablet. It lacks components such as built-in Bluetooth, stereo speakers, GPS, and front- and rear-facing cameras, most of which are common elements of tablets today. It also doesn't possess some common tablet capabilities, such as navigating primary tablet screens (for example, the home screen and content libraries) in landscape mode. Another omission: You can't view folders of images and movies in the included image gallery--all of the media thumbnails end up in one big bucket. (Barnes & Noble says that it plans to address this issue in a future update.)

Still, the Nook Tablet's low price will make it appealing to fans of both e-readers and tablets. In fact, it's priced low enough to sway some consumers who might have been considering an iPad 2, which has a larger display, but also costs twice as much. Considering the Nook Tablet's competitive price and beefy specs, makers of other so-called "value" tablets (including Amazon, with its Kindle Fire tablet) may find that it poses a serious challenge.

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Now, thanks to a slew of buyback programs and trade-in services, upgrading from last year's model doesn't have to sting. Sure, trading in used technology isn't as lucrative as selling it on eBay or Craigslist, but it's a lot less of a hassle.

PCWorld looked at eight such programs--Best Buy, BuyBackWorld, BuyMyTronics, eBay Instant Sale, Gazelle, NextWorth, RadioShack, and YouRenew--weighing the amount they pay and the benefits they provide to determine which ones offered the best deal in various categories of popular tech products. Let's examine the results for each category, so you'll have a better idea of where to go to get the most money for your old gadgets. (Click any chart image to enlarge it.)

Smartphones: eBay Instant Sale

eBay's Instant Sale trade-in service offered the best prices, on average, for five popular smartphones, including an HTC Evo 4G ($200 in good condition) and a nearly three-year-old iPhone 3G 16GB ($141 in good condition). The site is free to use and offers free shipping and removal of personal data. If you're looking to trade in a phone--particularly an Android handset or iPhone--eBay is consistently the best deal.

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When Amazon released its proprietary Kindle e-reader, it transformed the publishing industry. Then the company delivered a version of its e-reader for the iPhone. Now Android users get a slice of the e-book action with the new Kindle app for Android. This app allows you to access and read your purchased (or free) Kindle e-books on your Android smartphone, and it automatically bookmarks the page where you left off reading.

To use this app you must first log in to your Amazon account. If you don't already have one, you need to leave the app and create an account in a Web browser, which is unfortunate; it's an indicator of poor design when the user must leave an app to take advantage of core functionality.

But wait, you're not ready to return to the app yet. First you need to configure your 1-Click settings, and then you can browse the Amazon catalog and select your book(s)--with your Web browser, not with the Android app. Boo, hiss!

You can create bookmarks as you go, and jump to a specific location in the text. Unfortunately, the locations don't correspond to print-version page numbers; they are local and specific to your Android device. And though the menu has an entry for Go To My Notes & Marks, the app gives you no way to make notes, and no method to sync your Android bookmarks between devices. You can't search the text, either.

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