High-Tech Gadgets for the Holidays

High-Tech Gadgets for the Holidays

by Ross Karchner

Some people are great gift givers. Those are the people who wouldn’t dream of letting a birthday, holiday, or special occasion pass without seeking out a tasteful, appropriate gift. But let’s face it: in the real world, tasteful, appropriate gifts are the ones that gather dust. Instead, let us focus our attention on the gifts that are really appreciated and actually used: high-tech toys. This season, stores are full of great ideas for the electronics lover on your gift list.

Home Entertainment
Home Theater Systems
Most people have TVs, and many own DVD players, but few have made the investment to turn their living rooms into true “home theaters.” Which brings us to DVD have-nots; what a great Christmas to be one of them! Several manufacturers (Sony, Panasonic, and Boston, among others) have created all-in-one home theater kits that include a DVD player, stereo receiver, and a 5.1 speaker set. This single-handedly eliminates all the complexity of creating your own home theater.

The coolest home theater kit is Sony’s DVD Dream System, which you can find locally at Circuit City, Hi-Fi House, and Tweeter. The DVD player has all the hardware necessary to act as the stereo receiver, which is normally a separate unit. This makes it as easy as plugging the player into your TV and plugging the speakers into the player.

The Dream System’s DVD player is pretty standard compared to the current generation of DVD players. Most will play audio CDs and Video CDs (VCDs) in addition to DVDs. VCDs are a pre-DVD, post-Laserdisc way of distributing movies. Some units will even play burned CDs filled with MP3 audio files.

One DVD player that does all of that is the Go Video DVR4000, which can be found locally at Costco. It supports all the formats listed above and every major audio standard in addition to being a full-featured VCR. This is the perfect gift for someone whose entertainment center only has room for one VCR or DVD player or for a disappointed person who must spend money earmarked for a DVD player to replace a broken VCR.

Digital Entertainment
Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have been on the market for over two years now. These devices fuse together the capabilities of a computer, VCR, and cable box, offering on-screen channel guides, automatic recording, and even preemptive recording of shows it thinks you’ll like (based on what you have chosen in the past). The abilities to pause, rewind, and fast forward live TV are also standard. The devices mainly differ based on how much storage they offer.

For this gift to “keep on giving,” one must pay monthly service fees or lifetime membership charges, so they are only appropriate gifts for those who are willing to pay at least $10 a month to enjoy the benefits of the device.

Tivo and ReplayTV, which have been around since the beginning, have a new competitor in Microsoft’s Ultimate TV. This DVR brings some cool stuff to the table, such as a built-in WebTV and picture-in-picture capabilities; it even allows you to record two shows at once. Unfortunately, UltimateTV only works with the DirecTV Satellite system.

Tivo and ReplayTV are available at most electronics or department stores; UltimateTV is available at Radio Shack.

Gaming Systems
This may be your last chance to give your favorite gamer fresh new hardware for a while; the current line-up of gaming hardware will most likely remain state of the art for the next five years or more. This year’s new systems include Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s complementary Gamecube and Gameboy Advance.

The Gameboy has remained relatively unchanged since its introduction 10 years ago (with the exception of the Gameboy Color in 1998). For Gameboy Advance, the controls have been repositioned, the screen is bigger, the colors are better, the sound is clearer, and it plays all of the older Gameboy and Gameboy Color games. In addition, a cable will be available to link Gameboy Advance to the Gamecube, enabling players to use the Gameboy Advance as a controller for Gamecube Games.

With the only relevant handheld out of the way, we can now focus on this season’s Christmas battle: Bill Gates vs. Super Mario…Xbox vs. Gamecube. The graphic capabilities of this generation of game consoles are pretty similar to each other and not significantly better than the Playstation 2 (which was introduced about a year ago). So the only thing to consider when choosing between the systems is the games — how many are there and how good are they?

The Xbox’s lineup of available games includes two real standouts: “Halo,” which shows off the Xbox’s network and multi-player abilities, and “Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee,” a 3-D platform game. On the other hand, Gamecube comes to market with an even smaller list of game choices. Your best choices here are “Luigi’s Mansion” — the latest “Super Mario Brothers” adventure — and “Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II,” which is already being hailed as the best game to come out of the Star Wars series.

With limited game options from both systems, your best choice might well be the Playstation 2 (PS2). In the past year, dozens of game developers have jumped on the PS2 bandwagon, making tons of games available. Of course, if you are shopping for someone who already has a PS2, your Christmas budget might be better spent on a few new games rather than a whole new system.

Barring any availability fiascos, almost any electronics or department store will have Gamecube, Xbox, Gameboy Advance, and PS2.

Personal Gadgets
MP3 Players
Almost everyone has heard of MP3s, but do you know how cool they are? At the standard quality rating of 128, one minute of audio equals roughly one megabyte (MB) of disc space. Most audio CDs hold about 75 minutes of music, but a standard CD-ROM can hold 10 hours of music if filled with MP3 Files. Even better, there are gifts that let people take CDs filled with all of that extra music with them. Portable MP3 players fall into three categories: players that use CD-ROMs (which can, thus, play normal audio CDs), players that use some other removable storage, and self-contained players that require a hook-up into a computer to change the selection.

The best value is probably found with players in the last category. Although these players are less flexible, they more than make amends by offering a mind-boggling amount of music to take with you. The heavyweight of these MP3 players is the 20GB Creative Nomad Jukebox. You can check my math, but 20 GB of space equals almost two weeks worth of not-hearing-the-same-song-twice. The Nomad Jukebox, which is also available in a 6GB configuration, is roughly the size of a portable CD player but somewhat thicker. It connects to your computer through the USB ports and works equally well on Windows PCs with USB or any recent Apple Macintosh computer.

The same cannot be said of Apple’s iPod MP3 player, which seems to have been designed with exclusivity in mind. The small device, which you could easily lose it in your pocket, comes with 5GB of storage (3 days worth of music). It connects to your Mac’s Firewire port (a plug which is still not standard for PC’s running Microsoft Windows) and instantly synchronizes its playlist with (and only with) Apple’s iTunes MP3 software. Still, the iPod is being praised as the best designed and most usable MP3 player released thus far.

If you want an iPod under the tree Christmas morning, your best option is to visit store.apple.com. The Nomad Jukebox can be found at Circuit City.

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)
An electronic organizer can bring organization to person’s life — and sometimes even a little fun, if it offers games and the capability to play music. Sony’s Clie is a hand-held computer with a color screen, built-in MP3 player, and support for Sony’s proprietary and expensive (but nifty, nonetheless) Memory Stick storage devices. However, if you peel back all of Sony’s extras, you’ll find that the Clie is functionally identical to the latest generation of devices running Palm, Inc.’s PalmOS.

PalmOS is not the only operating system choice for your pocket, though; several companies sell devices running with Microsoft’s WindowsCE, a stripped-down version of the same Windows you run on your computer. Leading the pack for these devices is HP’s Jornada and Compaq’s iPaq, which both have enough power to truly earn the name “handheld computer.” They use a familiar interface and integrate seamlessly with Microsoft’s desktop software, which may be important in workplace.

All of these hand-held devices can be found at Circuit City, Staples, Office Depot, and Sears.

Computer Must–Haves
CD Burners
A CD burner looks like a CD-ROM drive, but it can be used to create music CDs, VCDs, or CD-ROMS. CD burners vary in speed and rewriteability. A CD Recordable (CD-R) drive can make discs that are permanent, and a CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) drive use discs that can be burned more than once.

Pay attention to speed when choosing a CD burner. CD burning and reading speeds are measured in terms of X. One X is the speed at which a normal audio CD player spins. Writing, rewriting, and reading speeds are normally expressed all together, like “24x/10x/40x” for a burner that writes CD-Rs at 24x and CD-RWs at 10x and reads CD-ROMS at 40x. Higher speeds are generally better, but the decibel-conscious may be annoyed at how loud some of the faster devices are.

Popular models in local stores include TDK’s VeloCD series, Hewlett-Packard CD-Writers, and other models from the usual suspects like Sony, Yamaha, and Panasonic. All are available locally at Circuit City, Sears, and Walmart.

Wireless Networking
The addition of a broadband router to a household that includes multiple computers and only one high-speed Internet connection can make its $40 per month price tag less painful. The high cost of DSL or Cable make much more sense when the benefits are spread out; the family doesn’t have to stand in line to use the Internet, and resources (like printers) can be shared.

Most of the competing devices work the same way; they differ mainly in ease of configuration and how you connect to them. They plug directly into your DSL or Cable modem on one side and into the rest of your computers on the other. A computer can connect via Ethernet, Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HPNA), or Wireless. Ethernet is fast and reliable, but unless the computers are in the same room or the house is pre-wired for Ethernet (a rare thing), the person getting the router is going to have to buy and install cables in every room with a computer. This can prove to be a bigger pain than it’s worth. HPNA is slower, but it uses the house’s existing phone wiring to connect your computers together. What’s more, you can still make phone calls and use DSL on the same line.
Large electronics stores will carry these sort of devices, the most popular being Linksys’ Etherfast products. Other popular brands include D-Link and 2Wire.

Here is a note of caution: before you venture into those electronic stores in search of the perfect gift, do your homework! Talk to salespeople, talk to your friends, and research on the Internet. If you make the wrong selection, you could end up giving someone a shiny, electronic mistake. Happy gift hunting!

Editor’s Note: MODE Weekly would like to thank Circuit City in Harrisburg and store manager Eric Delk for their time and efforts in our gadget photography session.