O gadget-tree

>> This season’s best tech bets

by MICHAEL CITROME

The fat man in the red suit brought a lot of treats for gadget lovers this winter. The mighty Canadian dollar and a smorgasbord of new technologies has put some of the greatest gadgets ever within your grasp. Go go gadget shopping!

Electric Slide: Dying for an Apple iPhone? A drive down to the Apple store in Albany, New York will satisfy your slide-to-unlock craving. It’s not sold in the much closer Burlington, Vermont store because there is no AT&T carrier support in the Green Mountain State. And don’t worry—there are plenty of shady ways to get your iPhone up and running on Telus or Rogers, none of which involve a soldering iron. But beware, future Apple updates may brick (disable) your iPhone without anyone to complain to.

Apple iPhone, $399.99 USD at U.S. Apple stores (but you’ll need a Rogers or Telus SIM card to use the iPhone with a Montreal number.)

Touch and Go: If you want something that looks and feels like an iPhone, minus the phone (but with a warrantee that actually applies in this country), consider the iPod Touch. It has the same screen as the iPhone, and it’s actually thinner. It runs the same software, so you can squeeze and pinch your photos, watch YouTube videos and use the amazing Safari mobile browser to surf the Web anywhere there’s Wi-Fi. You get 16 gigabytes of memory, twice the iPhone’s capacity, and you can still fake people out by talking into it.

Apple iPod Touch, $399.99 available at all Apple retailers.

Incredible Shrinking Laptop: Asus’s Eee PC is the anti-laptop. It’s tiny, about the size of a paperback book, with a widescreen 7” display. It’s light, at less than a kilogram. It runs Linux, with a built-in 40-application productivity suite including a word processor. And it’s fast: it boots up in 15 seconds, and uses a 4GB Flash chip instead of a hard drive. With Wi-Fi and a Webcam, it’s a complete computer that you can carry with you all the time, with a 3.5-hour battery life.

It’s no desktop replacement, but for note-taking, Web-browsing and YouTube, it’s just the thing. Need more memory? Plug in a Flash drive or an external hard drive. And if you’re a masochist, install Windows XP. But isn’t that defeating the point?

Asus Eee PC, $399.99 at www.thesourcecc.com

Juicy: iPhone might get the hipster cred, but the BlackBerry Curve is the baddest ‘berry yet. The Curve corrects all the criticisms of previous crackberries, with a built-in camera, MP3 and MPEG4 video support, Wi-Fi and BlackBerry maps.

Plus you can use it as a wireless modem for your computer, it works with Microsoft Exchange e-mail, it supports stereo Bluetooth headphones, has a built-in speakerphone and expandable storage using MicroSD cards—all of which the iPhone does NOT.

Of course, there’s its whole raison d’être, BlackBerry e-mail, the ultimate electronic leash for knowledge workers. When it comes to business, the Apple iPhone is just a junior associate. BlackBerry is the senior partner.

BlackBerry Curve, $299 with a three-year contract from Rogers www.shoprogers.com

Mobility, Mo’ Blogging: Nikon’s new S51c digital camera isn’t just another stylish, pocket-sized, 8.1 megapixel camera with a 3” screen and 3X zoom lens. No sir. It does something really special. The S51c is one of a handful of digital cameras on the market that have built-in Wi-Fi.

Take a picture with the S51c, and if you’re in range of a Wi-Fi network, you can upload your photo directly to Flickr, or e-mail it to friends using Nikon’s Picturetown Web site. So if you snap that incriminating photo of the Prime Minister dressed as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, you can share it with the whole Interweb on your PM Spy Blog before four burly Mounties wrestle you to the ground and confiscate your brand new Nikon.

The only downside is the Wi-Fi only works on unsecured networks, so if you have a password protected network at home, you’re out of luck.

Nikon S51c Wi-Fi digital camera, $319.99 at www.henrys.com

My Definition: Blu-ray players are still in the pricing stratosphere, but Toshiba brings the HD-DVD goods this Xmas with a pair of (relatively) low-priced players. The $299 HD-A3 does pretty much what you’d expect a bare-bones HD-DVD player to do: it plays HD-DVD and upconverts regular DVDs via its HDMI output, so your existing movies get the HDTV treatment. Unfortunately, it only supports up to 1080i, which is great if you have a 720p screen. For $100 more, the HD-A30 adds 1080p output. Otherwise there’s no difference between the two. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the extra expense.

But either way, the new Blade Runner five-disc box set ($79.99) will look awesome in HD.

Toshiba HD-A3 and HD-A30 HD-DVD Player, $299 and $399 at www.futureshop.ca

Now Hear This: Noise-isolating headphones are great. You can listen to your music (or even quiet podcasts about handicrafts and kittens) at low volume and without blowing out your eardrums in noisy places like cafés and the metro.

Unfortunately, noise-isolating headphones tend to be pricey. But JVC’s HA-FX55 earbuds have been spotted for as little as $15—list price is $45.
Even at list price, these headphones are a great value, with powerful low-frequency bass response, a 4.9-foot cord and three sets of washable elastomer earbuds, small, medium and large, to comfortably fit ears of any dimensions.

And at $15, these phones should be a stocking stuffer for every portable music lover on your list, including that guy on the bus blasting “Crank Dat” out of his tinny headphones for everyone to “enjoy”—or is that guy you?

JVC HA-FX55 noise-isolating headphones: as low as $14.99 at Best Buy and Future Shop stores