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Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Toys and Neat Stuff
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today's bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the holiday season. Technically, you can toy with just about anything, so the items that follow aren't necessarily the ones you'll find on the shelves of your average toy store, though there's certainly a few of those too -- mostly, they're items that we thought were simply too awesome to escape your notice this year, but didn't make it into our standard categories. Read on!
Five no-ship gifts for the last minute geek shopper
At this point, midday on Christmas Eve, basically all shipping deadlines have passed. If you're lucky you can find a store that has items for people on your gift list, but let's get real: You're choosing between gas station beer cozies, dancing reindeer and clearance VHS tapes. If you want to find something that will please your peeps now, I have a few ideas for you below. * Paid upgrades. A lot of people of varying levels of geekitude are users of "freemium" services like Flickr and Evernote. They'd probably appreciate an upgrade to a paid account (or an extension of their existing paid account). This is nice because it's practically instant, and it isn't like the size or the color will be wrong. Print the email out and put it in a card, or get super creative with the presentation, and you're done. * Online smarts. You can get a gift account for something like Lynda.com or Safari and help your nerd friend achieve +5 Intelligence in the subject of their choosing. There are a wide range of topics here, so your recipient will likely find something they enjoy. * Software licenses. Know someone who uses the previous version of a particular application because they never got around to getting that new license? You can get a lot of software licenses online now, so buy someone you love a license for that program they love. Or encourage someone to dive into software you already love: Something like Scrivener (if they are writer-types) or TextMate (if they have been really good). * Geek Time. If you are a consultant by trade, or just the alpha geek in your particular circle, get a card for someone and offer them a block of time with unlimited access to your brain. Or give them a certificate for a specific task: help setting up that iPod, upgrading to Snow Leopard, or implementing a backup solution. (Tip: This can be a team gift, if you know someone else got them some tech.) There are a lot of ways you can go with this one. * Photo albums online. It always seems like someone is missing at Christmas time, so what better way to include them? Get some nice shots of all the gift opening and toss them on the photo sharing service of your choice. Get a short URL from someplace like bit.ly and customize it, then send it off in an email or give the person a call. Get extra points for having a group photo holding up a "Merry Christmas Uncle Albert!" sign. If you have any additional ideas for last minute gifts, let's see them in the comments. Update #1: ryemac3 has a great suggestion: vanity domain names. Get your parents the site they've always wanted at 'thewilkersons.net' and watch the fun!
Target gift card for the holidays multitasks as adorable digital camera
Okay, we don't know who came up with this idea, but we have to give them some credit for innovation, not to mention (in our opinion) some pretty attractive design sense. Yes, Target's new gift card gimmick this holiday season is that it doubles as a cute, disposable digital camera. The little device runs on two AAA batteries, has a self-timer, and is packaged with a USB cord, driver disc, instruction manual and a voucher for 40 free prints from Target. The camera itself is a 1.2-megapixel affair with 8MB of memory on-board, which means it can store about 50 images. Now, we know this just a ploy to get us to buy Target gift cards, but we're kind of smitten with this little thing. Oh, and: Bah! Humbug![Via Coolest Gadgets]
