It may take a village to raise a child, but that’s a trivial task compared with the act of bringing a new electronic gadget to market. Not many of us understand technology so much as what it does. Here’s a list of the greatest ideas that powered helpful, friendly features this year and will, perhaps, meet a better next year.

THE FLASH-DRIVE FUEL gauge

You gotta love those USB flash drives. They’re cheap, shiny and tiny, and they offer a practically perfect way to transport computer files. On the other hand, you gotta hate it when you plug in a flash drive to receive a file you need ¿ and discover that the darned thing doesn’t have enough free space.

That’s the beauty of Lexar’s Mercury flash drive, whose case has a “fuel gauge” — a bar graph that tells you, without even plugging the thing in, how full it is. Thanks to a technology called E-Ink, this graph is always on and stays visible indefinitely, without requiring any power whatsoever.

THE MAGNETIC POWER CORD

Somewhere there’s surely a support group for people who have dragged their $2,000 laptops to the floor by tripping on the power cord. That doesn’t happen with Apple’s 2006 laptops, whose power cords connect with a powerful magnet rather than a pin or a plug. If someone trips or yanks on the cord, the magnet detaches and drops harmlessly to the floor. The laptop switches seamlessly to battery power, saving your data, your money and months of therapy.

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