Ding, ding! The second round of our Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century tournament is now over. Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to see which triumphant gadgets have marched into the quarter finals, and which ones have been bludgeoned into a bloodied, crumpled heap, mumbling incoherently as they’re buried alive in a field just outside of town.
In arguably the biggest upset of the second round, the HTC Desire HD Android smart phone received a baseball bat to the skull at the hands of Apple’s iMac. But it wasn’t a humiliating defeat, with the Desire HD managing to amass a respectable 48 per cent of the vote.
Other portable tech titans received a more substantial drubbing. In bad news for Apple, Sky+HD punched the iPad right in the kidneys, and the TomTom Go Live sat-nav tweaked the MacBook Pro’s aluminium nipples until it begged for mercy, which was not forthcoming. But the iPod classic righted the balance for Apple, adding a dash of arsenic to the Nintendo DS’ ostensibly refreshing martini.
Apple’s iPhone also smothered Amazon’s Kindle with a pillow in its sleep, taking a massive 84 per cent of the vote. The iPhone will now go on to face the BlackBerry Bold 9700 in the quarter final, with the BlackBerry having just murdered the Pioneer Kuro TV with a candlestick in the conservatory.
In a clash of the consoles, Nintendo’s Wii performed a drive-by shooting on the PlayStation 3 and will now face the Xbox 360, which just put a cobra in the Sony S470 Blu-ray player’s Wellington.
It’s early days when it comes to the voting in the Apple-flavoured quarter finals, but the iPhone is currently opening a can of whup-ass on the BlackBerry, taking 83 per cent of the vote. Sky+HD is poking the iPod classic in the eye, with 61 per cent of the vote, and the TomTom is performing an unanaesthetised root canal on the iMac, taking 72 per cent of the vote. The Wii is calling in a napalm strike on the Xbox 360, with 53 per cent of the vote so far.
Come back next week to find out which gadgets have been clubbed, throttled and poisoned in the quarter finals, and don’t forget to cast your votes. Let us know how you feel about the outcome of the tournament so far in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.
- Excited about the quarter finals? Then make sure you head over to our Greatest Gadget of the 21st Century tournament page to vote for your champion.
- Every time you vote, you’ll be entered into a draw to win an Arcam rCube, a BlackBerry Bold 9700, a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and a MiFi from Three or one of ten Idapt i4 multi-gadget chargers.