USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham lists off the top ten tech turkeys of 2016.
USA TODAY

NEW YORK—Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 might have claimed a spot on the tastiest products to consider this holiday season — but we all know how that one turned out.

After receiving high praise during its late-summer debut, the twice-recalled and ultimately discontinued phablet phone had a tendency to catch on fire. Disqualified! Time to move on.

Fortunately, the products on this list might be deemed hot for another reason. They've left a (mostly) positive impression these past 12 months.

*Google Pixel.Pixels are the first phones in which Google took over all aspects of the hardware and software design, borrowing from Apple’s playbook, resulting in a superb, well-rounded smartphone. The cameras are excellent, certainly on par with the equally fine iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S7 shooters.

What particularly stands out is the presence of the Google Assistant, the voice-driven, artificial-intelligence-infused digital assistant. While not perfect, Assistant encourages you to have a conversation, helped out at times by contextual buttons that appear on the screen with suggested replies. (Though its role differs some, Google Assistant is also at the core of the new Google Home speaker, Google’s answer to Amazon’s Echo.)

The phone runs the latest version of Android called Nougat and also supports Google’s new mobile Daydream virtual reality headset. A 5-inch version starts at $649; the 5.5-inch Pixel XL model starts at $769.


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*Sony PlayStation VR. This has been a breakout year of sorts for virtual reality headgear and choosing a winner has a lot to do with your budget and perspective. The promise of VR, of course, is that you can find yourself in an a fully immersive virtual environment — in outer space or becoming Batman — that would be impossible or close to it for most of us in real life.

Google brought out the aforementioned $79 Daydream, which competes most directly with Samsung’s $99.99 Gear VR, both decent solutions for folks with compatible mobile phones.

At the high-end of the VR spectrum, we saw the debuts of the ($599, or $798 with soon-to-be available Touch controllers) Oculus Rift and ($799) HTC Vive, the latter of which exploits what is known as room-scale VR.  As the name suggests, it means you’re meant to move around rather than having to sit still or pretty much stand in place. The good news about that is you can engage in a compelling and immersive VR experience. The bad news is you need a large enough space, making the setup especially tricky. Moreover, both Vive and Rift are expensive, and you must hook them up to robust computer systems.

Enter Sony PlayStation VR.  At $399.99, it isn’t exactly cheap either, and that price doesn't include the required ($59.99) camera, or the pair of motion controllers ($99.99) that you’re probably going to want. And oh yeah, you need a PlayStation 4 console as well, which starts at $299.99 before any Black Friday discounts. But many already have the console, and either way the experience is a lot cheaper than with Rift or Vive. The truth is, you're not sacrificing much in the fun department.