1. Bluetooth headset – BEEWi BBH120
If often seems as though headphone cords
have a mind of their own, which is hell-bent on getting as tangled as possible.
Thankfully, fixing that is easy, thanks to Bluetooth headsets such as the
BBH120. The cans are lightweight and solidly built, and sit on your ears rather
than around them, meaning that they’re compact. Connection to our test phone
was quick and faultless, although the audio was quite bass-heavy; a niggle when
listening to orchestral music, but forgivable when listening to electronic music
or distorted guitars. The BBH120 also loses a point because the LED on the left
ear cup flashes when in use. It’s pointless for the wearer and distracting for
those around. Otherwise, this is a good headset for the money.
Bluetooth
headset BEEWi BBH120
Price: $85.5
Manufacturer: www.bee-wi.com
2. MP3 Player – Cowon iAudio X916GB
Smartphones haven’t quite killed off MP3
players yet, with sticklers listing battery life and storage issues as reason
to stick with a good old-fashioned MP3 player. The Cowon iAudio X9 excels in
terms of the former, as its claimed battery life of 110 hours for music
playback (13 hours for video) means it can easily run for a week without
needing extra juice. The sound quality on offer is excellent too, thanks to the
infinitely tweakable JetEffect5 engine. Video performance is less pleasing,
unfortunately, with a lackluster screen resolution of 480 x 272; there’s no
support for MPEG4 video either. With video off the table, and a comparatively
meager capacity of 16GB, the X9 is too large and expensive to be attractive.
Cowon
iAudio X916GB
Price: $240.9
Manufacturer: www.cowonglobal.com
3. Board Game – Kingdom Builder
Complex systems can evolve from
surprisingly simple rules, and fantastically. The rule book is nothing more
than three sheets of A4 paper, and the gist can be essentially boiled down into
one simple statement pieces must be placed adjacent if possible. From this
simplicity springs tactical depth, and the scoring system means that you only
find out who wins at the end of the game, keeping the atmosphere tense. The
variable win conditions and customizable board play their part too, making sure
every game is different, and the simple rules mean it’s easy to pick up. Sod
Monopoly, play Kingdom Builder with the family this Christmas.
Board
Game – Kingdom Builder
Price: $56.5
Manufacturer: www.queen-games.de
4. Toy lamp – Tetris Light
If you ever need to distract an office of
tech journalists, it seems that you can’t do better than a set Tetris lights.
Few people were able to walk past without having a fiddle with the colorful
blocks, with most reacting with delight as the tetrominoes lit up or turned off
as they were added or removed from the stack. They’re certainly fun, but many
people also remarked that the blocks felt disappointingly cheap and plasticky.
The light that the set emits also has a noticeable flicker to it, meaning that
any room lit by the lamp will resemble some sort of rave. They aren’t perfect,
but for $48.5, they’re a fun coffee-able distraction.
Tetris
Light
Price: $48.5
Manufacturer: www.paladone.com
5. External Storage – Lacie Little Big disk thunderbolt 240GB
With a theoretical bandwidth of up to
10GB/sec, you’ll need some seriously quick external storage to get the best out
of Intel’s new Thunderbolt connection. Luckily, LaCie is doing its best to
oblige with the Little Big Disk 240GB, which plays home to a pair of 120GB
Intel 320-series SSDs preconfigured in a RAID 0 array. This generated some
truly quick transfer speeds, with the disk delivering read and write speeds of
550MB/sex and 218MB/sex respectively in our large file test. You pay for the
privilege, of course (in fact, the price is borderline lunacy), but if you
positively must have the quickest external storage device out there, this is
the fastest we’ve seen.
Lacie
Little Big disk thunderbolt 240GB
Price: $840.5
Manufacturer: www.lacie.com
6. Performance nutrition – Gamer grub
Tired of having to eat inconveniently
shaped food while gaming? Greasy fingers ruining your k/d ratio? Help could be
at hand in the shape of gamer Grub. Package in convenient ‘tear-n-tilt’ bags
and boasting a suspicious-sounding ‘proprietary cognitive blend’ that
apparently contains neurotransmitters, Gamer Grub claims to keep your fingers
free from grease and your mind quick and focused. We don’t have the resources
to test the latter claim, but we will say that the PB&J flavor we tried
received a decidedly lukewarm reception thanks to the excessively artificial
taste of the peanut butter chips and the blandness of the sweet bread flakes.
Only the most culinarily challenged need apply.
Gamer
grub
Price: $16
Manufacturer: www.gamergrub.com
