The 8th Pocket-lint Gadget Awards are officially underway, and we want you to tell us what are the best gadgets and gizmos for 2011.

There's no 4-month voting process ahead of all the big launches, no silly awards categories that allow publications to give everyone and anyone an award; just five nominations for each of the 10 categories - basically, the creme de la creme of 2011.

No excuses, no rubbish, just winners

To get to that final moment of being crowned the must-have phone, television, etc, we need to give our elite judges, our industry experts and you, the public, a list of five gadgets for each category to choose from.

And to do that, we need your suggestions for what should be nominated for the 10 award categories.

The categories are:

- Best digital camera

- Best laptop

- Best app

- Best game

- Best TV

- Best tablet

- Best music device

- Best mobile phone

- Innovation of the year

- Product of the year

How we pick the nominations

Once the nominations are in, we use a list of the most popular nominations, alongside our own list that we’ve been working on for the last 11 months, to come up with the final five shortlisted nominations for each category.

Basically, this means that nominations are awarded to the best five products in that category, a feat in itself.

So what gadgets are eligible? Our rules on this are simple. We have to have seen the device ourselves on Pocket-lint (no guessing from a spec sheet) and it must have been released between December 2010 and December 2011.

That means no 3-year-old gadgets winning the top spot and no gadgets yet to be released under the claim of "most wanted product".

How you can nominate

Letting us know what you want nominated is easy.

For PR teams or companies looking to be included, you need to make sure we have seen your latest products. If we haven’t seen it, we can’t nominate it.

For readers, there are a couple of ways to get in touch. Give us your nominations via the comments below, via our feedback form, via Twitter or via Facebook.

We will then take your suggestion or suggestions into account when coming up with the final nominations. And we'll announce the shortlist on 14 November.

The winners will then be announced on 29 November, giving you plenty of time to adjust your Christmas shopping lists.

You can nominate as many products as you like.