From the perspective of cool gadgets, this has been a very good year for me. A big part of this is because I work for a communications consulting firm that tries to keep its finger squarely on the pulse of current trends in culture and technology. We get the occasional gift from the office that’s very cool, very popular and very hard to get.

As a guy, these are the coolest things I’ve had my hands on this year. Some are in short supply and most are pretty spendy, but if you’re looking for the perfect gift for a buddy, a boyfriend, or a husband, I don’t think any man would complain about something from this list.

Without further ado, my top 5 gifts for gadget-loving guys:

5.) Air Hogs R/C Indoor Micro Helicopters - Reflex: $40-$60; Havoc: $15-$30

 

These come in two flavors. The slightly larger Reflex Heli has dual rotors that spin in opposite directions to create stability. This stability is both the Reflex’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. Despite having two small prop-driven nacelles on either side of the unit, it’s virtually impossible to get directional thrust out of this bad boy. Turning from side to side is a cinch, but forward and back are a virtual no-go. I tried adding weight to the nose to get some forward drift, but I got too much, crashed into a lamp stand, and snapped a rotor blade.

This little chopper is still extremely cool, and with some tweaking has decent maneuverability and excellent stability and takeoff/landing and hovering capabilities.

The smaller heli from Air Hogs is known as the Havoc. For $15 at a Black Friday sale, I picked one of these up and I couldn’t be happier with it. The Havoc makes up for the faults of the larger, more stable (and more expensive) Reflex by being ten times as much fun. With a few aluminum coated stickers stacked under the nose, this micro-heli gets excellent forward drift, and the tail rotor gives quicker directional response time than the Reflex’s mid-body nacelles. The Havoc doesn’t really hover much - it’s always in motion, but it’s agile, controllable and tough. Sophia stepped on this after spinning around trying to catch it and broke off one of the stabilizer wings. A dab of superglue and it was back to normal in a few hours.

The battery useage is more intense on the Havoc because it doesn’t have an AC adapter and the helicopter’s internal battery charges right from the remote, drawing off the 6 AAs you mount inside the controller. But it charges in a fraction of the time the Reflex does and flies for nearly as long. It also comes equipped with a cool blinking led light that looks great in low-light conditions.

These are not just boy toys that will turn your husband back into the eight-year-old you keep telling him he needs to grow out of. My wife got one look at the Havoc and went back out and bought two more - one for herself and one for Kiana, who is ten. We have wars in the living room, attacking each other in the air like some kind of micro R/C aerial siege engines.

The family that plays together…

4.) Garmin Nüvi 660 GPS - $400-$600

 A few months ago, we decided to take an impromptu road trip to New England. We decided to leave one Friday morning and were on the road by Friday evening - a recipe for getting lost, many times. There was simply insufficient time to prepare, so I finally buckled down and decided to buy a GPS (oh darn!). After a bit of quick research, I decided on the Garmin Nüvi 660. The price point was mid range as portable GPS units go, and it had all the features I could ask for, and some I will probably never need (like European maps.)

The speaker was crystal clear, and the turn-by-turn voice prompts are well-timed and quite helpful. I can find food, gas, lodging and shopping in the immediate vicinity with just a couple clicks of the touch screen. It saves gas, it saves time, and I’m astonished with how quickly I’ve come to depend on it. No more printing out google maps and struggling with them (or losing them en route.) It just works.

A word of caution, however. As I mentioned before, our van was broken into (smash and grab) and the GPS unit stolen simply because I left the suction mount on the dashboard.  These units are a hot commodity on the street, and even a suction-cup mark on your windshield can earn you a break in in some areas, even if you’ve taken the unit out of the car entirely. I also learned that in attempting to replace our 660 with the 750 (part of the newer product line from Garmin) that the 660 was of superior quality. Not only did it have more robust features, like traffic alerts (that are available on the 760 and up) but the quality of the unit itself seemed higher. The speaker on the 750 was crackly and weak, and experienced distortion at the higher end of the volume scale. When we discovered that our insurance company was not going to reimburse us for the stolen unit but rather send us a replacement, we returned the 750 and kept the new 660 that came in the mail. It’s definitely the better of the two. Amazon’s got a deal on these at the moment that’s better than what we paid at Sam’s Club.

3.) iPod Touch - 8GB for $299; 16GB for $399

 This little beast arrived as an early Christmas present from work just before Thanksgiving.  Our CEO, taken with the iPhone, decided (after some consultation with yours truly) that the iPod Touch was probably the better item for most of the staff. 

The screen on the iPod Touch is gorgeous, and it plays videos and displays your photos in crystal-clear resolution. An internal accelerometer recognizes the position of the unit (whether it’s being held horizontally or vertically) and changes the display to match the position. For example, if you’re looking at a photo with the unit straight up and down, it’s a small thumnail image, but in flipping the unit over on it’s side, the image expands to the full width of the screen. This feature also works with album selection on music playback, and video playback as well.

The Touch is Wi-Fi enabled, which means that you can connect directly to a (limited version of) the iTunes store whenever you are in range of an accessible Wi-Fi network. You can also surf the interwebs on the built-in Safari browswer. The functionality is limited here, with flash and java applets not playing, and an inability to directly download MP3s from websites offering their podcasts directly is an annoying disability on an MP3 player.  It would be less annoying if my podcast subscriptions were available through the iPod Touch version of the iTunes store, but for some reason they aren’t.

This is my biggest gripe. I subscribe to Glenn Beck’s “Insider”, and I therefore have access to the podcast version of his show every day after the broadcast. The problem is, I can’t download the show from work because iTunes is computer specific, my iPod won’t sync with my work laptop (since it’s set up on my home computer), YamiPod (which is free software that circumvents the need for iTunes) won’t interact with the Touch because it’s too new, and the WiFi connection won’t allow me to download the MP3s directly.

I’m stuck, therefore, with waiting to get home to get my new podcasts when I could be listening to them on my lengthy commute. I don’t like listening a day later to a show that deals with current events. Call me an info snob, but I prefer to be current.

My other complaint about the Touch is its screen. Because the interface is entirely touch-based, you get lots of fingerprint smudges, though these are fairly easy to clean since the screen is actual glass (and therefore scratch-resistent too). But the sensitivity of the screen is sometimes just not up to par. I’ll hit pause three or four times before it registers, or I’ll find myself unable to get the volume slider to actually slide down, all while something is blaring in my ears. I haven’t dug into the settings to see if I can up the sensitivity, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

All in all, this is an impressive little device. It only holds 16GB, which is step down from my video iPod (that held 80GB), but the screen, functionaliy, cool factor and slim case make it far and away my favorite of the two. I can slip it into my shirt pocket and go, and when you ride a lot of public transportation, that’s a plus.

2.) Nikon D40 - $550-$600 for camera body with 18-55MM lens; but shopping around can score you a kit with extra lenses for about the same.

This was my birthday present this year. My lovely wife, who used to believe in shopping therapy, has become tremendously frugal in our years together and found the purchase of this digital SLR camera to be a bit painful. We don’t buy a lot of expensive stuff as a rule, but this year we splurged a little bit, and I’m extremely grateful for things like this.

I don’t know that I could yet be classed as an amateur photographer, but I have definitely graduated from point-and-shoot mini digital cameras. I’ve gotten some good photos out of them, but it was time to move on to something even better. If you’ve got cute kids (and let’s face it, we all think we do) a camera like this is an investment I can’t imagine you’ll ever regret. With numerous adjustments at your disposal, from aperture to shutter speed to exposure length, it allows you to get the shots you couldn’t get before with your old camera. How many times were your kids doing something that made you want to grab the camera at night, in low-light situations (when you know the shot won’t come out), or during the day, when you have all the light you need but you require a high speed shutter to keep them from being nothing but a colorful, tannish blur?

The D40 is all the camera I could imagine needing in the forseeable future. I can (and probably will) add any number of accessories to it as time goes on, but I have the features, the functions and the quality I’m looking for all wrapped up into a package that gives me all the satisfying mechanical shutter clicks of the SLRs of old. Battery life is impressive on this unit, and the Lithium Ion battery recharges in only 90 minutes (but lasts me several days).

So far, I can’t find a single complaint about this camera. Some will note that it’s only a 6 Megapixel (as opposed to the D40X or the D80, both of which have 10) but I don’t see this as an obstacle. My research has led me to believe that unless I’m blowing up photos to the size of an entire wall, the resolution I have at my disposal will work fine for anything from desktop wallpapers to poster prints.

1.) Nintendo Wii - MSRP: $250; Actual Price: Market Value (check Craigslist…)

From the sounds of things, everybody is still trying to get their hands on one of these a year after they came out. This is precisely why it became a must-give gift for our company. Hot gadgets like this are at the heart of our understanding of pop culture, and this summer an army of interns was sent on a methodical, relentless quest to buy enough Nintendo Wiis for everyone in the company. When the mission was at long last accomplished, we were rewarded with the sight of over forty of these puppies stacked in a pyramid in our staff conference room. “You get a Wii, and YOU get a Wii, and YOU get a Wii!” Oprah couldn’t have done it any better herself.

I will confess to you that I’m wary of video games for the simple reason that I enjoy them entirely too much. They can be as addictive as any other bad habit, but they are also challenging and stimulating and far more interactive than TV. The Wii steps it up a notch with the cool controllers. If you have been living in a cave and haven’t seen one of these in action, the controller looks kind of like how a television remote might look if it were designed by the team at Apple. Smooth lines, just enough buttons to do the trick, and glowing blue LEDs for extra ambience (and to tell you when you need new batteries).

These controllers are equipped with both infrared and bluetooth, and that means you’re wireless, baby. A sensor bar that sits atop the TV detects the position of these remotes (I call them Wii-motes, much to my wife’s annoyance) in three-dimensional space, and reacts accordingly. The game that comes with the Wii - Wii Sports - is still our favorite. Many a tennis battle, bowling match, or golf game has played out in our living room, each game requiring the use of the controller in the same basic motion as the real sport would be played. If you’re playing tennis, you hold the controller like a racket, and yes, forehand and backhand and even the angle or speed of your serve matter. Bowling requires bowling movements. Baseball mimics baseball. You get the picture. It’s quite simple, and quite a lot of fun. And it gets everyone off the couch.

This game system is, without question, a blast. It’s less focused on individual gameplay and more about play as a family. A lot of anti-video game crusaders will probably dismiss it simply because it’s a video game system, but if you think playing board games together (or lawn darts for that matter) is fun, you’ll be hard pressed not to enjoy yourself here.

So there you have it. I’ve encountered other cool things this year, and there are more that I have my eye on, but these are my top five.

Among the other products of interest, I have Verizon’s FIOS service waiting for me when I get home, and I’m excited about that, because it’s exponentially increased my throughput over Comcast’s crappy cable internet service. (I was getting 768KBPS down and 350KBPS up on a good day through cable. Initial reports from the wife put download speeds at 13MBPS and uploads at 1.5MBPS, and that’s not taking into account her laptop configuration.)

I’m also considering saving up for the Rancilio Silvia, a professional grade single-boiler home espresso machine. (I’m trying to cut down on caffeine, though, so that my heart won’t explode. I may just have to stick with my lo-tech French Press for a while.)

I’ve also got a brand new PC configured and waiting for ye olde Christmas bonus, if it’s enough this year. My old PC has been nursed along for about four or five years, and some of the onboard components have survived power supply and motherboard failures, and are no longer operating according to spec. Yesterday I had at least 7 or 8 random restarts, probably due to bad RAM. No more of that for me if I can help it.

What it boils down to is this - I’m a geek, and a lucky enough one to work for a company where some of the coolest technology gets passed along to me free of charge (and free of lines and waiting lists). I’m also lucky enough to be married to a woman who loves me enough to buy me a sweet camera for my 30th birthday, even if she was cringing when she clicked “purchase”. Hell, I’m even fortunate enough to have a daughter so cool she bought her dad an R/C helicopter with her own money.

I’m just passing along the info gleaned from my good fortune to you. (No, you can’t have my old iPod.)

Filed under: Cool Beans, Gadgets, Geek Stuff