What to buy a geek for the holidays

By Beth Pariseau, News writer 18 Dec 2006 | Searchstorage.com

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A few items received multiple mentions from our experts -- Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Bluetooth accessories got the most mentions.

As far as the GPS doodads are concerned, several manufacturers were mentioned: Magellan, which one of our anonymous geeks (who asked to have his name withheld because he was talking about gadgets and presents when he should have been working) said is more reliable at pinpointing location and has a larger map database.

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Brian Babineau, analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said he'd put the TomTom navigation system to the test after moving from the Boston area to California last year. "After I moved, I had no idea where anything was," Babineau said. He added that TomTom has a "very easy GUI -- it walks you through and lets you add favorite destinations," he said. "And it's easy to see what turns are coming up, etc."

Other geeks mentioned Garmin, which also gets points in our book for having the most clever commercials.

Meanwhile, if you're seeing more and more people walking around looking like the Borg lately, it's not your imagination -- Bluetooth products appear to be here to stay.

Among the capabilities making Bluetooth the geek's friend this year are using headsets to hook up to iPods and then automatically mute and take over cell phone calls when they come in.

ESG founder and analyst Steve Duplessie recommends "maybe the best gadget company ever -- Newton Peripherals. Their first product is a PCMCIA Bluetooth mouse -- sits in the slot no one uses and charges, pops out and is a wireless Bluetooth optical mouse -- friggin brilliant."

Slingbox -- Nothing to do with French fried potaters

Two of our geeks also mentioned Slingbox, a nifty little thing that allows you to watch your home television from anywhere in the world.

"When you are on the road and your hotel has an Internet connection, but your favorite stations from home are unavailable, this a great device to have in your arsenal of electronic toys," said Troy C. Yeazel, director of operations for Fastrieve, a subsidiary of SourceCorp. "It kept me from missing the Thanksgiving evening Chiefs vs. Broncos game, since I was out of town and my family did not have NFL network service."

Nuts and bolts

If you have, say, $2,000 kicking around for a laser pointer, why not invest in a Blu-ray version?

Other items our geeks have suggested to us: ioSafe, a fireproof and water resistant disk drive for those disk-to-disk backups or a removable disk, like Imation Corp.'s Odyssey or Quantum Corp.'s GoVault, for moving video and audio files.

Videophones are moving from the realm of science fiction to reality, according to Babineau, who recommends the Worldgate Service Inc. Ojo personal videophone.

"If you're a geek, and you haven't been hacking a Linksys NSLU2 for your home network in one way or another, you're missing out," said Jeff Boles, IT manager for the City of Mesa, Ariz. "There's finally a pretty bugless and no brain required Debian installer to set up a pretty capable Debian box tied to whatever matter of USB device you might desire."

One gadget gift that can be useful no matter how tech savvy the recipient, is a crankable self-powered radio, which gets the major FM bands and a weather station, and also includes a light source. Some versions of these radios even include outlets that can charge phones and PDAs.

Bosch has a cordless drill that is super compact. "Small enough to be portable, powerful enough to twist your wrist off," was Boles' review.

For a geek with a digital camera, our geeks submit the Naneu Pro Sierra bag and eStarling Gmail/Flickr wireless digital photo frame. What? You knew it was only a matter of time, right?

"I'm thinking seriously about taking my whole house paperless with something like a Xerox Documate 252," Boles added.

Even without venturing into document management (and frankly, we hope we can pass our holiday vacations without hearing the words "records retention" even once), home storage is also following Moore's law -- last year's $2,000 1 terabyte (TB) network attached storage (NAS) devices are retailing this year for only around $400.

Stocking stuffers

But not all of us have wads of Benjamins sitting around waiting to be put to use on home NAS systems. For those on a budget, a few stocking stuffer ideas:

The complete boxed set of Firefly and Serenity. Geeks love this stuff.

Then there are the Cube World Series -- little digital stick figures that you can play with (and, apparently, agitate to amusing effect) on your desk.

If your geek already has a GPS, smartphone or the latest digital camera, hook 'em up with a new memory card, some of which can now hold up to 2 GB -- on a GPS system, that's enough to hold all of the base maps in the U.S.

When all else fails, it's hard to go wrong with a t-shirt. The Web is teeming with geek t-shirts whose sarcasm is designed to be unintelligible to the nonwired masses; our geeks' favorite was one from ThinkGeek Inc. that put a SQL command to humorous use.

Cautionary notes about gaming consoles, i-anything and smartphones

The Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are obvious ideas, but one of the areas in which our geeks were split, as are geeks throughout the rest of the world, who are currently engaging in religious wars about whether Blu-ray or HD DVD is the best, sleeping out in long lines to get their hands on the few systems available,and occasionally giving each other black eyes with them. It's best to leave those purchases up to the professionals, we think.

IPod and Mac are all the rage this year too, but once Apple launches iPhone at Macworld mid-January, warned one of our experts, "geeks will have crushing gadget envy just a few weeks after the holidays." Best to hold off on that as well, he said.

Speaking of the iPhones, save smartphones for the shopping list in 2007, our geeks said, when phones like Nokia's N95 will be widely available--with cameras, GPS, Wi-Fi, lots of memory and other cool features.

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