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TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Slightly wacky last-minute gifts
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. It's getting late, the shopping season is nearly over, and you just haven't found the perfect item for everyone on your list. Well, worry not: here are a few suggestions for your stocking stuffers that may align very nicely if that special someone is also getting an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone this year. ClamCase Gift Card: The idea of combining a Bluetooth keyboard with an iPad case is so compelling, it's no surprise that plenty of companies have introduced products along the same basic lines. Unfortunately, one of the most anticipated variants won't ship in time for Christmas, but if you've got your heart set on giving a ClamCase, you have an option: a customized gift card, ready to give to your iPad-toting family member. As a bonus, you'll save US$20 off the regular $119.99 cost of the case/stand/keyboard combo. Kork Case: If you don't need the keyboard but you do like the idea of keeping green when you encase your iPad, consider the Kork case. The lightweight 50-euro case is made from recycled (and recyclable) natural cork, giving you protection and peace of mind. Be sure to watch the instructional videos to avoid breaking your Kork when you put it on the iPad! iPlunge: It's a prop stand for your iPhone or iPod touch. It's a tiny little plunger. Really, now, what more do you need? As they say, "just lick it and stick it" ($5.99).
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Desktops
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. Desktops don't get much love these days, what with newfangled "laptops" hogging all the spotlight, but it's still an incredibly vibrant category, full of cutthroat competition, insanely powerful computers, and superfluous LED lighting. The result is tons of hot deals, particularly if you don't mind bringing your own monitor, wrangling wires behind an entertainment center, or being chained to a desk. In return you'll get performance that simply isn't possible on a laptop, expandability should you choose take advantage of it, and so many hot deals. Follow along after the break as we show you some of our favorites.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Tablets
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. You didn't think we'd let the holiday season go by without an official Engadget Tablet Gift Guide did you? Hey, give us more credit -- we know it's not 2009 anymore! The past year has seen an explosion in the tablet category, and while the iPad may still be the market leader, there's no shortage of Android and Windows 7 alternatives out there that let you surf the web, read books, and watch videos with just a flick of a finger. Sure, more are on the way, and all signs point to Apple updating the iPad in early 2011, but if you've got to have a touchscreen slab before the end of the year, we're here to lend a helping hand. Hit the break for a rundown of the best choices by price category.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Digital cameras
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. A new digital camera is a solid go-to gadget present for almost anyone on your list, since everyone loves taking and sharing photos. But pairing the right camera to the right person at the right price can be challenging -- with thousands of camera choices spanning every shape, size, and price tag, picking the right camera can be overwhelming. You're in luck, though -- we've looked through all of 2010's holiday camera offerings and narrowed things down for you. Read on!
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: HDTVs and home theater
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. A brand new HDTV is a gift that can get plenty of use throughout the year, but it's also one of the more expensive items on Santa's list. If you're shopping for the home theater enthusiast who has everything, there's always room in the cabinet for another streamer or demo disc. From 3DTV to network connected to throwback disc-based media, there's a lot of new options on deck for the 2010 holiday season - let's see if we can narrow the list a bit and make sure your gift scores a ten out of ten even if your budget is more like a two.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Docks and Alarm Clocks
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. Portable media players: from grandma to the nieces and nephews, it seems like everybody's got one. But if they're only using it on the road, they're not getting their money's worth. That's why we've assembled this selection of alarm clocks and docks for every locale and every budget, with the features your loved one will need to get the most out of their device.
TUAW Holiday Gift Guide: iPhone GPS apps
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. Well, another holiday approaches, and it's time for me to survey the field of apps that will help get you from here to there in a minimum of time and hassle. I surveyed these apps last year, and some things have changed for the better. Prices are lower, there are more regional options (so you can buy a map that fits where you might be driving), and the addition of multi-tasking in iOS 4 makes a big difference to how useful these apps can be. I think one of the biggest changes from last year is that the apps are now so solid and full featured that I can't think of a compelling reason to buy any of the dedicated GPS devices. With so many people using smartphones, I suspect these all in one GPS navigators will suffer diminished sales and interest. %Gallery-110320%
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Should I buy an Apple TV?
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. The second-generation Apple TV might just be on a lot of Christmas lists this year. The new Apple TV is inexpensive at US$99, now allows streaming of photos and some video (YouTube and Netflix, for example) from iOS devices, and isn't plagued with hot operation, large size or slow response like the original one. Long-time TUAW readers may remember that I really hated the first-generation Apple TV. It just didn't seem like something that came out of Cupertino, and I enjoyed gutting my old Apple TV as an experiment to extract some photos that I had saved on it. Well, the second-generation device is small, fast and easy to use, and the remote control app that is available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad make it even more enticing. But do you really want to get one for Christmas? Let's talk about what you need in order to be able to use an Apple TV. First, you should have an HDTV with a free HDMI port. The Apple TV uses HDMI output, and you frankly don't want to try to use an HDMI to Composite, HDMI to DVI or HDMI to Component adapter. It's designed for ease of use, and Apple wants you to be able to take a standard HDMI cable and connect your Apple TV to your HDTV in seconds.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Music gear for the Mac musician
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. Choosing the right gift for an Apple-loving musician can be very tricky. Usually, they've got everything they want already because they can't wait for the latest and greatest -- they just get it for themselves as soon as they can. Or they are so overwhelmed by the choices presented to them that they can't make a decision and therefore obsess about it for months on end. To say the least, it can be very difficult to give the Apple-loving musician the right gift. Ironically, to top it all off, the gift-giver is usually not a musician, nor do they understand the gear and tech that most commonly goes with being a musician. For instance, when I start talking about music tech to a fellow musician in the presence of my wife, she looks at us as if we're speaking an alien language, and try as she might, she can't help but get extremely bored very quickly. So, to help you (the musician / beloved gift-giver) make the right decision, we've gone to the trouble of putting together a list of some of our favorite music apps and pieces of music tech from the last year. You'll definitely find something here that an Apple-loving musician is sure to be pleased with this holiday season.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: PMPs
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. You tech savvy lot may think PMPs are a dying breed, but funnily enough, the market's still going strong with a handful of products. There are certainly some benefits from using a dedicated media device alongside your phone: more battery juice, greater range of supported file formats, better audio quality, more form factors to choose from, etc. Perhaps our list of gift recommendations will be more convincing -- check it out after the break.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Interactive books for children
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. Looking for an inexpensive gift for that special child in a home with an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch? You really can't do better than an interactive children's book or two (or three or four -- maybe a series of them!). Over the past year or so, the market for these new and exciting books has blown wide open. A quick check of the iTunes store shows hundreds of such books, and last April it was reported that a full 81 percent of top selling book apps on the iPad store were for kids. In this quickly emerging market, you'll find many of your old favorites, as well as a huge number of new books especially made for iOS devices. Interactive books allow children to jump into the story by interacting with the pages. Not only do they give you the option of having the book read by a professional narrator, but objects seem to come alive when touched, providing animations, sounds and many other surprises, including the ability to touch a word and have it spoken, highlighted or both. In a real sense, these books seem to come alive. This guide is far from comprehensive, since there are new books hitting the App Store every day, and I have only seen a small fraction of them. I will only recommend ones that I've read. With series like Dr. Seuss, I haven't read them all, but since they mostly work the same way, I feel comfortable recommending them as a series. Read on to find some great books for kids this holiday season.
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!
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Gaming
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. Sit back, relax, grab a controller, and enjoy some obsessive-compulsive button mashing while you work in that body-sized groove into the couch... that's not the M.O. for the console makers this year. You don't have to embrace the jumping, hand-waving, and other methods of physical exertion, but it's definitely the "it" gaming hardware of this holiday season. Be sure to triple-check just what box your loved ones play on, and click on through for our gaming gift suggestions.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Standout iPad stands
Not a day had passed after the introduction of the iPad on April 3, 2010 that we began hearing about stands for the device. Let's face it; an iPad is much lighter than even a MacBook Air, but your arm can get very tired holding one for any period of time. I'm not talking about docks here, just stands to hold your iPad in one place while you use it as an ebook, a movie player, a game device, or even a computer. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px} span.s1 {letter-spacing: 0.0px} span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; letter-spacing: 0.0px color: #2000a8} Rock and roll One of the more unique iPad stands can be used to cradle an iPad in your lap or hold one on your chest while you're in bed watching a movie. Are your kids watching playing games on your iPad in the back seat of the car? This is a great way for them to hold it in their laps. It's the PropUp stand, which can be purchased for $24.99 from the PropUp store.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: E-readers
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. E-readers have really started to come into their own in the past few years, and there are now a bevy of options ranging from the utilitarian to the multi-tasking. If you're thinking about getting a reader for a friend or loved one, look no further: we've got our best picks below.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: iPad for photographers
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. As we enter the first full-blown holiday season since the iPad's release, there are a good many people out there who are either getting one as a gift or toting one along to Grandma's to wow the family and, quite possibly, use it as a laptop replacement. If it's the latter, you're more than likely going to need to use the iPad as a means of clearing the card on your digital camera at some point. Here are a few things that will make the process easier.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: Shopping apps
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. Tomorrow officially begins the holiday shopping season in the States, and that means recycled air, linoleum floors and Orange Julius stains on your Quacker sweater. Of course I'm talking about the mall, which is best experienced in limited doses this time of the year. To help you get in and out, we've compiled some shopping apps to bring along with you. Here's what we found. Best bet -- avoid the mall entirely Some people enjoy the bustle of a holiday mall. Others prefer to stay at home. For the latter, we offer these handy apps. Windowshop (Free, compatible with iPad) Windowshop for iPad provides an iOS-friendly front end to Amazon. The entire selection is available and sorted by category: electronics, books, the Kindle store, movies, clothing ... 34 main categories in total, each with several sub-categories. Tap any item to pop up an information panel with photos, a description, customer ratings and, of course, the Add To Cart button. You can even add to your wish list and share items via email, Facebook or Twitter. Finally, a search field lets you avoid all of that scrolling and tapping. It's a tidy app that provides iPad-optimized access to Amazon's immense collection of stuff. Those with an iPhone/iPod touch will want to check out Amazon Mobile.
TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: External drives for every Mac
Welcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier. Giving someone a new hard drive can be one of the best gift choices ever. Whether the recipient uses it to store backups of their photos or movies, or wants to be able to boot an aging Mac a bit faster, the gift of storage is always appreciated. In this edition of the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide, I'll give you some ideas for inexpensive drives that are a good gift for someone who might need some extra gigabytes in which to store some personal information, up to some expensive arrays that can store terabytes of data. As usual, this is just a sampling of the many models and sizes of drives that are available from a variety of manufacturers. If you have a favorite drive that you think might be the perfect gift for that special someone, leave a comment below -- we'd love to hear about it.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Netbooks and laptops
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. We're not going to lie, buying a laptop as a holiday present can be seriously scary. Not only are there tons of systems to choose from, but you're about to put down quite a bit of cash on something that's probably going to end up being someone's primary machine for a few years. Does your giftee need a netbook for just getting on the web to check e-mail? Or something thin and light with enough power to watch HD movies on the go? How about a Core i7-powered rig with discrete graphics to handle that Call of Duty: Black Ops that was in the stocking? You see, it's a daunting task, but fear not, we're here to ease the pain. Our breakdown of the best laptops is after the jump.
Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Video Cameras
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. Photos make great mementos for important moments, but a picture of your kid taking her first step or writing his first blog post isn't quite as meaningful as a full-motion video of the event in question. That's why a video recorder of some sort is a must-have, and while your average compact camera is capturing better footage than ever, sometimes you need something a little more dedicated. That's when you need a camcorder, and this year we even have a bunch of 3D models to choose from. Which ones are right for you and for your budget? Click on through to find out.