Stephen Fry announced as Gadget Personality of the Year

Stephen Fry has tonight been honoured as 2009's Gadget Personality of the Year at the glitzy T3 Gadget Awards ceremony in London. The beloved British actor, comedian, playwright and blogger has been recognised for his passion for gadgets and the massive influence he wields in the UK technology arena.

Mr Fry joined us at T3 Towers to collect the prestigious accolade and delivered a heartfelt acceptance speech to our cameras. Click the play button to your right to see it in full.

As a Twitter pioneer, Fry has built up an incredible 826,000 avid followers and was one of the first famous faces to truly adopt the microblogging phenomenon one year ago, inspiring countless others to follow suit. Through his website Stephenfry.com and a weekly tech column in The Guardian (which he sadly had to give up this year due to filming constraints) he has also built a name as one of the most influential, knowledgeable and trusted tech reviewers in the UK, especially in the mobile phone sector.

His ringing endorsement of the Apple iPhone helped to strengthen its position as king of the smartphones, while a ravaging critique of the BlackBerry Storm sealed the handset's fate as one of the biggest tech flops of recent times.

Always entertaining, eloquent and educated, Stephen ranked as the fourth most influential person in technology in T3's inaugural Tech 100, beating out the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Although most famous for his role as Lord Melchett in Black Adder and his comic partnership with Hugh Laurie, Fry's tech roots are deep. He claims to have "never met a smartphone I didn't buy" and was the second person in the UK to buy an Apple II computer.

Congratulations to Stephen Fry - one of our true tech heroes and the Gadget Personality of the Year for 2009.

We'll have a full interview with Stephen on T3.com in the coming days where he discusses a range of subjects, from his love for Apple to whether Android can pose a challenge to the iPhone, who he thinks is the most influential person in tech and whether his Twitter fame ever annoys him.