Rewind to 2002

Gadget – BlackBerry 5810
RIM had been making email pagers for a while, but in 2002 the BlackBerry 5810 arrived… with a phone built in. There was no mic or speaker (you had to use a headset) but surely this was the point BlackBerry moved from specialist device to suited worker’s smartphone. And now they’re the must-have gadgets for spotty teenagers. Weird.

Film – Minority Report
Tom Cruise did running and made serious faces as usual, but all eyes were on the miraculous body-tracking motion control kit he had at his disposal. These days, we call it Kinect.

Album – Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Wilco’s fourth album found them in limbo: aspiring to psychedelia but compelled by the gravitational pull of accessible pop, they produced the brilliant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The cover art shows a photo of Chicago’s iconic, Jetsons-inspired Marina City.

Game – Ratchet & Clank (PS2)
Video games are rife with brilliant oddity. And bipedal feline Ratchet and his sidekick robot Clank were no exception. Despite having a cartoony feel at a time when fashionable developers were writing dark realism for the PlayStation 2’s powerful hardware to render, R&C made good with stunning gameplay and turned their alliance into a successful franchise.