Well, its that weekend again... time for what my friend Gary at work calls the "compulsory consumer season." And being a high tech gadgety kind of guy, I already have my eye on a few cool new toys. If you have a person like me on your list -- or if you'd just like to send me a present -- these ideas should give you a nice, if expensive, starting point.
I was all set to sing the praises of the new Furby, which is already the hit of the season. But you can't find the 30 dollar toy anywhere, except in some of the online auction houses. Furbee is an animated stuffed animal that speaks its own language and can actually learn new words over time. It reacts to your movements and incredibly, the actions of other Furbys. Give Furby positive feedback and it learns... Play some music and it dances. Aside from its somewhat creepy looks, it ties in my opinion with the coolest toy of the year... the new programmable Legos.
Mindstorms allows PC users to control a Lego creation... a robot actually. Using what's billed as a simple programming language, kids can make their Lego robots do all sorts of things... pick things up, react to intruders, or fight other robots. Created in partnership with MIT, these Legos are a bit more expensive than the regular kind... $220. But at least you can find them.
Too geeky? Well, how about a book then? Of course, this season it can't be just any old analog dead tree kind... instead, try the Rocket eBook ... a $500 digital device about the size of a regular hardback but you can swap new books in and out of its memory banks. Trouble is, the books cost about the same as you'd pay for the paperback. There is a competing product called the SoftBook, which costs 100 bucks more, but has a built-in modem to download new titles. The SoftBook doesn't require a computer at all, while the Rocket eBook only works with Windows PC's. Still, its a cool new way to read books, without having stacks of yellowing pages crammed into your book shelves.
Along the same lines as these digital hardbacks is the Clio... a lightweight computer that's somewhere between a laptop and a PDA. Running a scaled back version of Windows, the Clio has a unique screen that can open like a regular laptop, then fold back into a notepad-like arrangement where you can use a pen to write on the screen. Its a way cool design, is about the size of a piece of paper and weighs just 3 and half pounds. For a thousand dollars, you get a built-in modem, lots of memory and a scaled down version of Microsoft Office.
But not all cool new things are digital, take the Sparrow, which may be the most impressive looking car since the new VW Beetle. Well, its not exactly a car... they call it a personal transit module... a PTM. Its a three-wheeled electric vehicle that's making the rounds out in the San Francisco Bay area. At only 13,000 bucks, its clearly a steal... look at what you get. Its runs about 30-60 miles on a charge, parks in a motorcycle parking space, tops out at 60 miles an hour, lets you commute solo in the carpool lanes, and according to the makers, handles like a slot car, whatever that means. We've linked to their web site from the Weekend Edition home page because the bulbous, futuristic design defies description.
Still, when I asked around my tech-loving office for cool new toys, the best suggestion came from one of the engineers at work, Rocky. Give something experiential this year, he said... tandem skydiving, a weekend getaway on a Harley, or golf lessons. They're not cheaper, but they don't get outdated and they sure don't require all the batteries.
---
Clio PDA
Electric Car - The Sparrow