Go-go gadgets

Impress the techy on your list with
these futuristic gifts

Acer Aspire N270

by MICHAEL CITROME

Whether you’re planning to spend the winter holidays by the slopes, on the beach or in the heart of the city, these gadgets will keep your thumbs, ears and eyes happily occupied for months to come.

Pocket HD: The latest pocket-sized camcorder from Flip packs a punch—this tiny (4 x 2 x 0.6 inches) video camera records your adventures in high-definition 720-pixel widescreen video, so your home movies can look as good as a Blu-Ray disc (although it’s up to you to add the giant explosions, gratuitous bullet-time and sassy, back-talking CGI sidekicks).

Flip MinoHD

The Flip MinoHD may lack the features of a fully-featured camcorder—it only has a 2x digital zoom, the screen is a postage-stamp-sized 1.5 inches (but it’s glare-proof), and its built-in 4 GB of memory will only record up to an hour of MPEG-4 video—after that, you need to plug the camera into your computer to offload the video.

But how many $300-ish hi-def camcorders will fit into your pocket with your keys, turn on in a split second and plug into any Mac or PC to edit and upload your movies? With a two-hour battery life between charges and instant video uploads to MySpace and YouTube, the Flip minoHD may be all you need.

Flip MinoHD, $229.99 USD at theflip.com

Big Screen: Is that a projector in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Pack an Optoma Pico and the answer will be yes to both.

In terms of sheer whiz-bang factor, get ready for this: it’s a device the size of a mobile phone that can produce a 65-inch image out of thin air. And that you can plug it into your iPod and run it off of battery power 90 minutes without it getting hot enough to melt your flesh like those Germans in Raiders of the Lost Ark, well that’s just gravy.

Optoma Pico

Okay, it’s not perfect. The resolution is only 480x220, which is better than broadcast, but not as good as even a bargain basement HDTV, and you only get that 65-inch image from eight feet away in a dark room. Otherwise it’s only about two feet across.

And the LED light source (which the Pico uses instead of a hot tungsten bulb) is only good for 20,000 hours, and it’s not replaceable. But that’s 40,000 episodes of Futurama, and about 833 days of constant operation, which means you’ll probably replace the whole $600 early-adopter toy with a projector that’s half the size, three times the resolution and a quarter of the price long before it goes dark.

Optoma Pico, $599.99 CND at ncix.com

Big in Japan: Everybody loves the DS. Nintendo’s sold nearly 85 million of the little clamshell video game systems, and geeks of all ages and nationalities are eagerly awaiting the brand new DSi, which is currently only available in Japan. But if you’re willing to deal with a sketchy grey-market importer and Japanese-only instructions, one can be yours this holiday season.

Nintendo DSi

The DSi improves over its predecessor with a bigger pair of screens (3.25 inches each, although it’s still just one touchscreen), a built-in Web browser and music player, an SD card slot (hello homebrew!) and two, yes two, cameras, one on the front and one on the back, to add sight to the DS’s touch and audio input methods.

At this point, we can only speculate what kind of weird Mario Kart cybersex will be the result of this innovation, but you can be among the first to find out for around $320, game not included.

DSi, retails for roughly $180 CDN in Japan

Small Wonder: Need a little netbook that you can slip into your backpack and not really think about until you end up in a free Wi-Fi zone with some time to burn and a hankering for collegehumor.com? The 1.6 GHz Intel Atom-powered Acer Aspire N270 gives you three hours of battery life, an 8.9-inch 1024x600 widescreen display and a 160 GB hard drive in a package that weighs a shade under a kilogram. That’s one-sixth the weight of Heston Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck cookbook.

There’s no DVD drive, but at least it comes with Windows XP and not Vista (and if you’re a real keener, you’ll get MacOS onto it for a nearly pocket-sized Hackintosh) and you can’t beat the price at under $400.

Acer Aspire N270, $399.99 CND at futureshop.ca

Nintendo DSi

TV to Go: Watching TV on your phone isn’t the futuristic Jetsons fantasy it used to be. But watching your own TV on your phone, with the channels you like, no matter where you are, that sounds interesting.

Enter Orb, a $10 iPhone application that uses your computer and its TV tuner (assuming you have one—if not, you’ll need to get one) to deliver a live video stream of whatever’s on TV to your iPhone, no matter where you are in the world. Essentially, it does the job of a Slingbox, but almost for free. So there’s no reason to miss a Habs game just because you’re on the beach in Cancun—as long as the beach has Wi-Fi.

Orb, $10 at www.orb.com