 |
 |
|
 |
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Review: High-tech gift ideas for music, storage
By Russell Kay (IDG) -- It's that time of year again, and for the IT person looking for a gift, we've assembled a gallery of high-tech gadgets, gizmos and good things to have or give. Some of these things are slightly far out, of course, and you may consider one or two overpriced, but that's part of the fun. Cool stuff 2002: MusicMazda MP3 You may think this is just a car; we prefer to call it the world's largest and most elaborate MP3 music player. It's a special version of Mazda's Protege (not to be confused with Toshiba's Portege laptops) that's been tricked out with a performance-tuned suspension, custom 17-in. alloy wheels with tires rated for 168 miles per hour, a leather-covered steering wheel and drilled aluminum foot pedals. But what about the tunes? Where's the music, the MP3? That's taken care of by Tokyo-based Kenwood Corp.'s 280-watt eXcelon MP3/CD sound system with a trunk-mounted subwoofer. The CD player can handle regular audio CDs and those with MP3 music files, meaning you can stuff a whole day's worth of nonstop listening on a single CD. Road trip, anyone? Bose Wave/PC Interactive Audio System Music used to be simple and straightforward; either you made it yourself, you listened to it on the radio or you bought a recording and played it on a stereo or boombox. But the Internet has added new media and complicated the issue. MP3 files and Web radio are important new music sources, and you can now buy and download music over the Internet. But most of us don't have PCs in our living rooms, so how do we get that music to our stereos?
One easy answer is the Wave/PC, a device that gives seamless access to online and off-line music via Web radio, MP3 music files, CDs and AM or FM broadcast radio. The unit uses Bose's acoustic waveguide speaker technology to deliver rich sound from a relatively small enclosure, and it comes with a remote control and a 15-ft. cable to connect to your PC. Included software and six presets for each audio source help manage and organize your personal music collection, no matter what media it's stored on. Mini CD/MP3 Player For a take-anywhere, high-capacity MP3 player, this portable from TEAC will fill the bill nicely. It can play up to three and a half hours of MP3 music stored on a mini-CD disc that's just 80mm in diameter and holds 185MB. It will run for up to seven hours on two AA alkaline batteries and offers antishock protection, a preset digital equalizer and bass boost. The player includes earbuds from Old Lyme, Conn.-based Sennheiser Electronic Corp., Jukebox software from San Diego-based MusicMatch Inc., and an AC adapter. RipGo! Designed to fit in the palm of your hand, Imation's RipGo! looks a lot like the TEAC below, an MP3 player that takes mini-CDs. Well, it also does more. It will burn those 80mm, 185MB mini-CDs too, making it the first mini-CD recorder on the market. For playback of digital music, the RipGo! handles both MP3 and Windows Media WMA files, squeezing as much as six hours of CD-quality music onto a single mini-CD. Yamaha Disklavier Mark III Singing Piano Player pianos are nothing new. A digital computerized piano, the Disklavier, has been around in various models since 1986. Yamaha may be better known for its motorcycles and electronics, but the company has been making pianos for 100 years. The Disklavier has always been capable of recording and playing piano music, and Yamaha recently added numerous synthesizer options to increase its versatility. Now, it has a voice. Actually many voices. It sings. Yes, for a mere $31,000 you can have the synthesized voices of Frank Sinatra, Christopher Cross and others singing their hits right in your living room, accompanied by your acoustic piano and a synthesized orchestra. Cool stuff 2002: EntertainmentFramed Ansel Adams Prints If you're anything like me, your work area is covered with hardware, cables, CD-ROM discs, manuals and all sorts of other things. One way to soften the confusion -- it won't help you organize it, but it may help calm you down -- is to dress up the area with something nice and peaceful, like the framed poster of "Oak Tree, Sunset City, California," one of Ansel Adams' classic black-and-white American landscape photographs, that's currently gracing the wall of my home office. This photograph and 23 others by Adams are available in 24-by-36-in. prints, framed or unframed, from Corbis in collaboration with the Ansel Adams Trust. If that's not to your taste, Corbis has lots of other images, paintings and drawings available in a variety of sizes and formats -- including wallpaper for your PC. PCStitch And now for something completely different. If you're one of the millions of embroiderers who are also into computers, try out PCStitch software. It helps you create unique cross-stitch patterns on your computer. You can convert clip art or photos into patterns or create patterns from scratch. New this year are stitched fonts, which you can use to design your own alphabets based on various stitches, and libraries for organizing collections of patterns. Seamless integration with PatternsOnline.com gives you access to hundreds of online patterns by top designers, which you can download and modify. Cool stuff 2002: StorageSAFE Personal Inventory Software Secure Assets for Everyone (SAFE) is a specialized database designed to help you inventory your household assets for insurance purposes, but it's adaptable to other types of inventories as well. What's different about SAFE is that it's available with a hardware component, ThumbDrive Secure, a flash memory storage device with built-in security from Singapore-based Trek 2000 International Ltd. With SAFE, you can create an electronic color catalog of all of your belongings, with information like serial and model numbers, date and place of purchase, price paid and transaction numbers, as well as photographs and more. Like any good database, SAFE allows you to generate reports in a variety of formats. Digital Wallet If you need to carry around a lot of digital data, then the Digital Wallet may be what you're looking for -- especially if your digital data is in the form of digital photos. A palm-size portable hard drive that weighs less than 12 oz. and contains a RISC microprocessor, the Digital Wallet has a capacity of up to 20GB. It allows fast and easy transfer of files too large for floppy disks and Zip drives. Data is transferred via a Universal Serial Bus connection or PC Card slot. Adapters allow you to copy data directly from a variety of flash media. The unit may be powered with an AC adapter or a rechargeable battery system that provides up to 120 minutes of use per charge. 5GB PC Card Drive This has to be the most space-efficient memory device available. A standard Type II PC Card that can be used in any laptop and many handheld PCs or personal digital assistants, this 1.8-in. hard drive holds a whopping 5GB of removable storage. It fits easily in a shirt pocket, even in its shock-protecting rubber case. You don't have to load any drivers or applications. When you plug it in, it's automatically recognized as another drive and is instantly available for use. 512MB Ultra Compact Flash Card In the space of a compact flash card, you can get a lot of data storage. In fact, you can get 512MB of storage in either of two different media: this new high-speed solid-state flash memory card from SanDisk, or a 1-in. hard drive made by IBM (also available in 34MB and 1GB capacities). The SanDisk product, however, is a lot faster, boasting a sustained write speed of 2.8MB/sec., and it's designed specifically for high-resolution digital cameras. Tomorrow's topic: PDAs and gadgets
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
RELATED IDG.net STORIES:
• Worst products of 2001
(PCWorld.com) • Cool gifts for cool nerds (Computerworld) • Great gifts for your PC (PCWorld.com) • Best free stuff online (PCWorld.com) • Home entertainment face-off (PCWorld.com) • Wackiest products of 2000 (PCWorld.com) • Best of the Web 2001 (PCWorld.com) • Top 5 card-making downloads for the holidays (PCWorld.com) Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
TECHNOLOGY TOP STORIES:
• Report: SUVs pose danger to cars • New telemarketer tool trumps TeleZapper • Terra Lycos logs $2.2B loss • AOL to offer song downloads • Microsoft seeks fiscal fountain of youth (More) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Back to the top | |
© 2003 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.
A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. |
