As the gift-giving season approaches, the dizzying variety of electronic gadgets and gizmos is greater than ever, and making a choice, especially if you have a technophile in mind, has never been tougher. But something from among the items collected here might strike your fancy. They include a pen from Logitech that stores handwritten notes in flash memory; several thumb-size removable hard drives that store hefty amounts of data in a device that clips onto a key ring; a cordless headset for a Bluetooth-enabled phone; and some of the smallest cameras yet, to say nothing of a pair of the personal digital system (PDA)/cellphone hybrids that may win your attention as a cellphone but then turn out to be far more than that.
The Power of the Pen
The digital Logitech io Pen is significatly fatter than a ballpoint, but comfortable in the hand and surprisingly light (53 grams with cap). Scribble your notes, diagrams, or to-do and calendar items on special paper [see "Swedish Start-Up Puts New Spin on Pen and Paper," IEEE Spectrum, July 2001, pp. 34-36] that helps the optics orient itself in following the text. The paper comes in three varieties: in a familiar Mead notebook, as 3M Post-It notes, or in a FranklinCovey day planner.
Put the pen in its cradle for synchronization through the cradle's USB connection with your Windows 98/Me/2000/XP computer. From there your notes may be stored or e-mailed using software included in the starter package, which comes complete with pen, cradle, five ink cartridges, an 80-page notebook, and 50 Post-Its. The day planner dubbed iScribe is available online from its manufacturer. The io Pen will hit retail shelves in January but until then will be available only online.
Price: US $50 (iScribe) http://www.franklincovey.com
Do-It-All Devices at Far Different Prices
The Sidekick, developed by Danger Technologies (Palo Alto, Calif.), doesn't offer everything its competitor does, but it has many important features—and in some ways outshines its pricier rival. Both have always-on Internet connections, but the Sidekick is faster, transferring data at a rate of 53.6 kb/s, versus 14.4 kb/s for the Communicator. The devices cut down on download times, pulling up stripped-down versions of Web pages and images.
Both offer AOL Instant Messenger and wireless e-mail with support for attachments such as Word documents, JPEGs, and Adobe PDF files. The Nokia phone has an edge here because its screen displays pages in 4096 colors, while the Sidekick does its work in monochrome.
The Communicator also has multimedia capability. It comes with software that converts multiple file types, so you can send, receive, and view video clips, digital images, and music.
giftf2b.jpg On the other hand, the Sidekick's headphone jack doubles as a port for an optional camera attachment; it takes snapshots that it could then send via e-mail. Handy as it is, the Communicator does not take pictures.
For e-mail, the Communicator supports many mail protocols; the Sidekick supports comparatively few. The phones are also remarkably similar in the features and functions available for personal information management (PIM), such as an address book, to-do list, and scheduler.
The Sidekick's data-syncing capability is limited. For the initial transfer of data from a PC, the user must upload the information to T-Mobile's Web site, which then forwards it to the device. After that, all additions have to be done manually and syncing with programs such as Outlook is not an option. The Nokia Communicator, on the other hand, syncs readily with PCs using common PIM applications.
When talking, you can either hold the T-Mobile unit up to your face—rather awkwardly—or use it with a hands-free headset. Although a bit clunky compared to the average cellphone you might see on the street, when held to the ear, the Communicator feels like you're talking through a phone instead of a Nintendo GameBoy. And any misgivings about its size are sure to be squelched when it is opened lengthwise to reveal its full Qwerty keyboard and color screen. The Communicator can also send and receive faxes.
Price: US $200 http://tmobile.com/
Price: US $599 http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator
If you've ever wanted to share what you were listening to on a portable MP3 player with a group of friends but had no way to amplify the music, look into the Soundbug mini-loudspeaker. About the size of a computer mouse, it turns ordinary flat surfaces such as tabletops, doors, or windows into sounding boards that could really blast out your song files. Wave Industries Ltd. has exploited the properties of a material dubbed Terfenol-D. Developed by the U.S. Navy to improve sonar, the so-called smart material is highly responsive to magnetic fields or low-voltage electrical signals generated by, you guessed it, an MP3 player. It responds by expanding and contracting strongly, making it well suited for converting the electrical signals to sound. Placed in contact with a resonating surface, it turns the surface into a loudspeaker with 75-dBm peak volume.
What if you could share broadband access across several computers in different rooms without ripping up the walls to install Ethernet cable everywhere? That's the strength of IEEE 802.11b or Wi-Fi wireless networking, which just got even less troublesome with home networking kits from Microsoft Broadband Networking Group.
The HBH-30 headset for Bluetooth-enabled cellphones has cut the cord attaching headsets to phones and portable music players. It's one of the first products of a joint venture between consumer electronics giants Sony and Ericsson.
The Casio Exilim EX-M1, which is roughly the size of an audiocassette, recently lost the title of the world's thinnest digital camera to the Pocket Digital. But the 12.4-mm-thick unit certainly justifies its extra space, packing in an MP3 player and a media card slot that supplements its 12MB built-in flash memory.
Spies may line up to trade in their Minoxes when they discover the Pocket Digital camera from Logitech Inc. It could easily be mistaken for a business card holder, but press the tiny button on the back, and the 6-mm-thick device takes a fairly decent snapshot. Its CMOS image sensor draws only 15 mW—a good bit less than typical CMOS sensors and far less than the charge-coupled devices in most high-end digital cameras. This miserly use of energy means it is unlikely that the camera's lithium polymer battery will run out of juice before a secret agent can fill the Pocket Digital's internal, 16MB NAND flash memory.
Imagine being asked the time and giving it after glancing over at what appears to most people to be nothing more than a badly wired traffic light or your kid's winning science fair entry. The BC-10 TimeCube binary clock, which displays the time with a panel of six by four LEDs, is bound to be a conversation starter. The columns represent the numbers one, two, four, or eight (from right to left), and the rows assign two LEDs each to the hour, minute, and second.
has the same capacity range as the ThumbDrives, relies on 128-bit encryption and your own PIN to keep data out of the wrong hands.
If you crave music, consider the Nomad MuVo memory key, which is also an MP3 player. The 64MB model will store up to 15 MP3 song files downloaded through a USB port. It plays them back (in the order downloaded) using control buttons on its face. Power for 12 hours of playback using headphones comes from a single AAA battery housed in an included cradle. From Creative Technologies Ltd., the business-card-sized unit comes in a 128MB as well as a 64MB version.
If security is a concern, the ThumbDrive Touch has a built-in fingerprint sensor that won't let just anyone get at the key's contents. Software included by Trek 2000 International Ltd. allows you to authorize use by two other people plus yourself. Capacity ranges from 32MB to 128MB.
For digital camera fans, the PenDrive.com's PenDrive Plus includes a slot that accepts SD and MultiMedia cards. Even if its flash memory is filled with important documents, you can free your camera's wafer-size memory cards to takemore snapshots.
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