10 Hottest Gadgets This Holiday Season

This is the Year of the Tablet. Amazon’s Kindle Fire (the Adam Sandler movie of electronic devices – panned by critics but a hit with actual consumers) made it to second place on Highbeam Research’s list of most-buzzed-about gadgets during the 2011 holiday season, just behind Apple’s latest attention-grabber, the iPhone 4S, but ahead of rival iPad 2. Highbeam, which indexes more than 80 million documents from over 6,500 publications, tracked mentions of popular devices as the shopping season began ramping up at the end of October. Many of the top names have business and productivity applications, and while media mentions doesn’t equate to sales, the correlation between the two – along with the ongoing consumerization of IT – pretty much guarantees that some of these goodies will make their way from Santa’s sleigh to a place inside your firewall in the new year.