Here’s our 2010 Year in Review of the best 10 hardware peripherals for your Mac that we’ve come across in the last twelve months.

If you missed any of these or didn’t get a chance to check them out for some reason or another, don’t fret — all of them are still available and worth a look.

10. Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive 2TB

Leander Kahney: Iomega’s new Mac Edition eGo Desktop Hard Drive packs a whopping 2-Terabytes in a compact, stylish package.

The Mac Edition eGo drive is a good-looking complement to Apple’s new glass-and-aluminum Macs. It’s styled to match Apple’s Mac Pro with a sleek, silver case and a grill front.

It’s available in 1TB and 2TB configurations ($159.99 and $249, respectively), and offers several connectivity options: there are two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 port. It ships with a FireWire 400-to-800 conversion cable, which makes it compatible with Macs without a FireWire 800 port.

There’s already a few hacks out there to allow you to extend the admittedly rather limited AirPlay functionality of iOS 4.2 to run on non-iOS devices: last week, for example, TUAW’s Erica Sadun released AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlayer into think your Mac’s an AppleTV.

Now, though, plucky and ingenious hackers are figuring out how to do the same thing on non-Apple hardware, and the first fruit of those labors has now been released for Linux.

We start off with two headlining games for the iPhone and part of the latest bargains from the iPhone App Store. “2012 Zombies vs. Aliens” is a strategy game marked down to $0.99, while “Duke Nukem 3D” is a classic first-person shoot-em-up that is free. We also have a deal on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook for just $850 after a $125 mail-in rebate.

Also on tap are cases for your iPhones, iPads and a deal on a 27-inch LED Cinema Display bundled with the Apple TV. As always, details on these and many other items can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

It wasn’t surprising that the first iAd to appear on the iPad is a movie trailer for the nerd nirvana ‘Tron Legacy’ and produced by Disney, where Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder. The iAd won’t be officially released until 2011, but the trailer gives iPad owners a glimpse of things to come.

Available within the TV Guide iPad app, the iAd is “chock-full of the rich graphics, touch navigation and video native to apps,” according to an Ad Age report. The iPad version includes “close to 10 minutes of video, images from the movie, a theater locator with showtimes, and a preview of the movie soundtrack with the option to purchase on iTunes without leaving the ad.”

Remember that old Mac you had? That beautiful iMac. It was lovely. Still works, but these days it doesn’t get used much.

It was a G5. One of the 17 inch models. You think. Wait. Or was it 20 inch? Damn, have to get it out and measure it now. It had a 1.83GHz Intel. Or was it a 2.33GHz? Dammit. You really can’t be bothered to boot the thing up just to check. But now you want to know.

One of our must-have iOS apps this week is the free OnLive Viewer that gives you a window in to on-demand, instant-play video games through the OnLive game service. Become a spectator and watch hundreds on games being played live throughout the world.

Facebook Browser for iPhone also makes our must-have list this week and provides a refreshing new way to experience Facebook on your iPhone, with a simplistic, elegant user interface.

Also among our favorites this week is Blueprint – a powerful application for iOS developers that enables you to easily plan and create stunning user interfaces for your applications.

Check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps after the break!

Angry Birds Lite is the top downloaded free game on iTunes in 2010.

The pigs-vs-infuriated-fowls diversion beat out Tap Tap Revenge 3, PacMan Lite and Rockband in iTunes Rewind, which highlights the most popular games, music, apps and TV programs in the iTunes Store for 2010.

Angry Birds was also the second most popular free iPhone download overall, trailing Facebook but coming in ahead of Skype and The Weather Channel.

And it’s not just an addictive freebie, either: Rovio’s Angry Birds, the $0.99 version, is also one of the top grossing apps overall.

Its feathered fury is more popular than Call of Duty: Zombies, Tom Tom, Plants vs. Zombies, Tetris and Doodle Jump.

On the wings of this success, Rovio has just announced that they intend to launching Bad Piggy Bank, a new in-game payment system which will allow Angry Birds players to make in-app purchases without going through Apple.
Rovio’s goal is to divorce the game’s in-app purchase system from a reliance upon a credit card. Bad Piggy Bank, then, will launch in Finland (where Rovio is based) on Elisa, the country’s biggest telecom provider, and any in-app purchases will be added to their monthly bill, or even purchase other games, with other countries and telecoms to follow.

It will be interesting to see if this gets Rovio into trouble with kids making in-app purchases. Apple’s policy has been to allow kids’ games to have them, but generally refunds the money to parents if they complain about kids unwittingly buying stuff in apps.

Via iTunes

We start off with another deal on a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad, this time from the Apple Store for just $449. Next is a new crop of price cuts from the iPhone App Store, including “Mini Squadron,” an aerial combat game for the iPhone or iPod touch. We wrap up our highlighted deals with an 8Gb iPhone 3Gs for just $19.

Along the way, we also take a look at another iPad stand, 85 percent off some HandHeld.com items and software for your iPhone and Mac. As always, details on all are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Will the iPad kill — or save — the newspaper? Countless observers have argued both cases. I come to bury these notions, not to praise them.

The newspaper industry is suffering through a painful transition, characterized by layoffs, closures, mergers and the abandonment of mission and even dignity in the quest to maintain relevance to advertisers.

The “iPad-will-destroy-newspapers” crowd assumes that paper is the problem. Paper is expensive, slow and bad for the environment. Because the iPad delivers news cheap, fast and without the conversion of trees into trash, the public will choose iPad-based news, which will kill off newspapers.

The “iPad-will-save-newspapers” people, on the other hand, see the wide range of news-reading apps as the newspaper’s salvation. There’s some logic to this, given that the iPad is a theoretically superior advertising platform. But that’s not going to happen.

We start off with a deal on an Otterbox Commuter Case for the iPad. The case, in black, includes access to all the tablet’s buttons ad ports plus features a screen protector. Next is an iMac Core i7 bundle, that includes a 2.8GHz quad desktop computer with 27-inch screen and three years of AppleCare. We wrap up our spotlight deals with the latest batch of freebies from the App Store, including “Orient,” a location orientation assistant.

Along the way, we’ll also check out a 93 percent off deal on iPhone 4 cases, a 50 percent off deal from ZAGG.com, and more. As always, details on these and many other items can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.