PC Bear Blog: Gift Ideas for Gadget Lovers

At this time every year, IT tech people get many questions regarding which gadgets make good gift ideas for last minute shoppers. As the Dean of Information Technology at Phoenix College, I’ve asked some of our technical people to send me their best—and I’ve listed these for our Phoenix College users. There are only a few guidelines to consider:

IT does not endorse any of these products, so check to see if the item will meet your needs.
The items listed are for your personal use and are not associated with Phoenix College.
Although a website is listed with the item, do check around for a better price or availability. I tried to pick Amazon.com as a central place to start looking for things, but definitely look at competing sites.

Many thanks to the following people for their creative ideas:
Mike Poplin, Davin Traylor, Raymond Wolfe, Geof Eroe, Albert Sockel, Bruce Knaphus

Item	Price	Description	Picture
Roll-Up Electric Piano	$59.00	A small roll-up piano with 100 tones and rythms.
Car Computer Mouse	$25.00	A computer mouse that looks like a Porsche with lights.
Projection Clock	$39.00	A clock that projects the time, date and temperature on any wall or ceiling.
VuZix Icuiti iWear AV920 Video Eyewear Glasses	$352.29	Computer displays built into a pair of glasses equal to 60" screen.
Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smartpen	$150.00	A digital pen that captures over 200 hours of recorded audio or 32,000 pages of notes. You can replay any lecture/speaker notes by just touching the page where you wrote it.
Bushnell Image View 8x30 Roof Prism Binocular with 3.2 MP Digital Still Camera	$151.00	Binoculars with built-in digital camera that takes pictures of whatever you are viewing.
Balanzza™ Luggage Scale	$25.00	Electronic luggage scale so you don't have to use the bathroom scale to read the weight of your bags. Avoid extra charges for overweight bags
Yoostar Entertainment System	$161.00	A simple entertainment system that lets you place yourself into movies and perform your own dialog with known characters. Yoostar software lets you seamlessly put your performance into existing movie, TV or game footage.
Sling Media Slingbox Solo Internet TV Broadcaster	$178.00	The Slingbox Solo Internet TV Broadcaster from Sling Media allows you to watch live television streamed from your home cable or satellite connection via the Internet on a laptop or cellular telephone. Connecting to your television and broadband Internet connection, the Slingbox Solo streams live television over the web and allows you to view it anywhere with Internet access.
Flip Ultra Camcorder 2nd Generation, 120 Minutes	$115.00	Pocket size, kiss-simple, no moving parts camcorder. 3 buttons, connects directly to your computer. PC or Mac.
Ollo robotics kit	$30.00	Robotics is a quickly growing field, and this kit for children of ages 8 and up will help them get excited and interested in the technology used to create a wide variety of motorized creatures and contraptions. Also, the instructions don't have words, just pictures!
Microcontroller experimentation kit	$150.00	For those tweens and young teens that have access to a computer running Windows, and are a little advanced , the microcontroller experimentation kit might prove to be a sound investment. This is a pretty serious array of tools that can be used to learn beyond beginning electronics circuitry techniques and programming.
JumpStart Advanced 4th-6th Grade School Essentials	$20.00	The JumpStart series are very well rated children's education software where nobody dies in the process. If you want to give constructive software to young children, these titles will suit your needs.
SPY FOX software series	$9.00	Inexpensive, interesting software for young children.
Kindle Wireless Reading Device	$259.00	One of the best e-reader types of devices, thin, light, wireless. Receive books and newspaper subscriptions over the air without a computer. No contracts or extra fees. Many bestsellers at $9.99.
Nikon Coolpix S1000pj	$445.00	A 12 megapixel camera AND a built-in video projector.
PICO Pocket Projector	$219.00	A very small pocket projector to display movies or pictures from anywhere and from most devices. Projects images up to 60".