As far as holidays go, the winter ones apparently have a Manifest Destiny on the rest of them. Each year, everything between Halloween and New Years takes one step closer to fusing into a kind of master holiday, analogous to some sort of Megazord of celebrations. However, this consequently also means lots of presents. Yay commerce.
This year saw a lot of gadgets enter the market, enough to leave the average consumer dizzy with model numbers, specs and hallucinations of blindingly shiny electronics. How fortuitous, though, you should be holding a holiday gift guide at this very moment. Even better is that said guide is broken down into categories for your convenience.
Netbooks — These pint-sized laptops are all the rage, and it’s easy to see why: They’re cheap, light and bursting with excellent battery life. All they lack are optical drives and high-performance components, but such additions would negate the netbook’s edge and simply make them an expensive, yet excellent, source of eyestrain.
However, under the “cheap” umbrella of things, $349 can net you an Asus Eee PC 1005HA. It has the standard netbook guts (Intel Atom N280, 1GB RAM, Windows XP), but the kickass six-hour battery life and fantastic keyboard and touchpad put this netbook way above the competition.
For slightly more money, though, at $399, you can snag an HP Mini 311 which has an Nvidia Ion graphics processor, making it almost as capable as a full-sized laptop. However, you will have to put up with a subpar touchpad and slightly, almost negligibly worse Intel Atom N270 processor.
Portable Media Player — Strictly MP3 players are so Willenium. If your portable media player can’t handle videos, apps, games and Web browsing on top of music, you have a problem, AKA a first-generation iPod (zing), and you are in desperate need of an upgrade because that just won’t suffice in this day and age.
Cream of the crop honors in this category goes to the iPod Touch ($278), what with its almost endless App Store and the top-notch apps offered within. However, once the Zune Marketplace starts to shape up, the Zune HD ($289) and its stupidly brilliant OLED display and superior audio quality will easily knock the socks off the Touch.
E-Reader — If you’re unaware, e-readers are devices made for the express purpose of providing the user with things to read, namely books. What’s the point, you ask? Well, they use this technology called e-paper, which works by reflecting light off of black and white charged particles to hold text and images indefinitely without using electricity. This not only means amazing battery life but also zero eyestrain since it operates almost exactly like regular paper, i.e., it uses ambient light for reading rather than emitting its own light. This eliminates the need to refresh the display and constantly bombard the user’s eyes with direct light.
These are some things that LCD gadgets just can’t provide, but that generally won’t convince avid smartphone and laptop users to make the switch to an e-reader for their literary needs. It’s a good thing, then, the Amazon Kindle ($259) comes with a service called Whispernet for downloading and purchasing books wirelessly with the device. The Kindle has some issues such as its low-contrast display and lacking organizational features, but the Whispernet service is hard to pass up, and it is definitely more technically capable than the Sony Reader or iRex iLiad.
For the same price as the Kindle, a couple weeks of patience and some faith, you could wait for Barnes & Noble to release the Nook Nov. 30. Such patience will net you an Android powered device that comes with a similarly sized 6-inch E Ink display, a 3.5-inch color touchscreen for input (compare this to the Kindle’s comically pedestrian keyboard), and a pretty sweet share feature that allows you to share certain books with other Nook users for up to two weeks.
There’s plenty more to cover in the realm of gadget wish lists, but these categories seemed the most likely to require immediate attention. TVs, handheld gaming systems, cameras and the like will have to wait for another time, but don’t worry, they’re coming.
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