The field was so strong, in fact, that Apple wound up with only one trophy--an Eddy for , which, in the editorial staff's opinion, delivered on the promise of the iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

It's unusual for Apple to have such a light Eddy haul. For the , as an example, Apple captured half-a-dozen trophies for everything from the original iPhone to Mac OS X 10.5.

So what gives with the lack of Eddys for Apple? After all, it's not like the company kicked back in 2008. It introduced (and updated) the MacBook Air, with a new design, updated its iMacs, introduced the next-generation iPhone, and refreshed the entire iPod line. And that doesn't even address new products like Time Capsule backup device or the rebranded and relaunched MobileMe online service.

And while most of these products got favorable reviews, both from our publication and elsewhere, when it came time to choose Eddy winners, we decided that most of those new Apple products were really only improvements--albeit very nice improvements--on products we'd already honored in previous years. It's hard to give awards to upgrades when you liked the originals so much.

The new Apple products that we thought were the strongest contenders for Eddys were the much ballyhooed and the new . But the more we discussed those two products, the more we realized that what we really liked about both was the software they had in common--the aforementioned updated to the iPhone OS. That mobile operating (along with the third-party apps it enabled) made Apple's smart phone and the iPod touch more truly useful than they'd ever been before. So that OS was the one Apple product we thought was worthy of an Eddy Award this year. We liked the new phones and iPods; we loved their new software.