Holiday Tech Review

Sure it’s just October, and there’s at least a couple of months before you have to worry about your Christmas shopping. Or maybe not, in the last couple of years there has been an increasing trend of companies releasing their products earlier during the holiday season so as to cash in on the holiday shopping. Unfortunately, a large number of these usually scarce products end up in the hands of hoarders, who capitalize on the season and sell the products on the black market (Ebay et al) making up to a 300% profit margin. In order to avoid spending an arm and a leg on your tech gadgets this holiday season, you need to get your list ready and start your shopping early. That’s where I come in. Below are my top three must-haves for UB students this holiday season.
The first gadget you should have on your wish list this holiday season should be a notebook computer. If you don’t have one, get one. It will minimize your having to constantly turn in your UB ID every time you need to check your e-mail. There are a wide variety of notebook computers to choose from, picking a laptop computer should be very user specific, i.e. you should get one that is tailored to your specific situation. An important factor to consider when buying your notebook is price (duhh!!), no really, the universal code that more expensive means better doesn’t work. In fact, unless you’re a programmer, video editor, composer, hacker or videogame addict the basic entry-level laptop should suffice. Make sure to get a widescreen, at least 1.6GHz processor clock speed (1.4GHz for Mac), 500+ MB RAM, Wi-Fi compatibility and at least a DVD/CD-R drive. You can get all this on an HP, Toshiba, Gateway or Compaq for about $700 -$1000, add about $300 – $1000 more for a Sony or Mac. I personally have no preference for any brand, but the word on the streets is that if you want more than three years of service from the notebook don’t buy a Gateway or Compaq, buy a Sony, Toshiba or Mac. Another must-have this holiday season is an MP3 player cell phone. Up until now, conventional wisdom has been that cell phones have a life span of about six months, so it has been more economical to have an MP3 player and a stand alone cell phone. With the availability of high speed MP3 friendly cell phone networks, cell phone manufacturers are spending more time and money in building MP3 players that double as cell phones. Motorola already has the ROKR available for $250 plus a service plan from Cingular, the so-called “iTunes phone” stores up to 100 songs with great audio quality. But as might be expected for any first generation gadget, the phone sucks, you cannot download songs directly to the phone, it has ridiculously slow download time, about thirty times slower than an iPod. So what phone should you get? I recommend getting Sony Ericsson’s Walkman W800 which is already out but in short supply or Nokia’s N91 which might be released just in time for Christmas, Both of these phones have memory in the 4GB range and are very user friendly and will probably retail for about $500 without a contract, and are much cheaper than buying an iPod and a camera phone separately.
Lastly, and arguably first is the all important game console. I believe there are only three legitimate gaming consoles worth coughing up over a couple hundred bucks for this Holiday season. They are the Sony PSP, the Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3. The PSP is a gaming console for everybody, it allows you to play numerous games from the PS2 platform with its stunning 32MB DRAM and 4MB embedded memory, watch new releases on the UMD format, surf the web with its integrated Wi-Fi, play MP3’s and Sony recently announced that a new add-on will soon be released that will allow you to just slide in your SIM card and use it as your GSM phone. So for about two hundred dollars and applicable upgrades, the PSP affords you the luxury of a gaming console, media center and a cell phone. It was previously available at any electronic store, but when I tried to get one at Wal-Mart, I found out that they had none in stock and it is becoming harder to get them. I am pretty sure that the closer we get to the holiday season the harder it’s going to be to buy one. So get yours now. The talk of the holiday season is going to be the new Xbox 360, if you’ve not pre-ordered your’s already it’ll be very difficult to get one at the advertised rates of $299 for the base version and $399 for the souped up version which includes a 20GB hard drive, a wireless controller, component cables for HDTV, and a wireless remote. Most industry experts expect it to be released by November 2005, and since Microsoft is yet to specify how many consoles will be available by Christmas, you just might be able to get one if you preorder yours now. Gamers are split down the middle on which next generation console will be better, the 360 or the PS3, sounds a lot like the argument of the PS2 versus the Xbox. This time, Microsoft has a big edge over Sony since the 360 will be out before Christmas and the PS3 will not. So my advice is to get the 360. And make sure to get the souped up version, because it’ll cost you about $200 to soup up the $299 version to the level of the $399 version. So no matter what you decide to get this holiday season, do as much research as you can on the internet about the products and make sure to start your shopping early or Santa might not show up at your chimney this Christmas.