Instead of going the boring and traditional route like buying her flowers and chocolates, why don’t you make her feel extremely special by buying her a high tech gift she can really use? Below are the top 5 tech gifts and gadgets to buy mom this Mother’s Day.
5. Wrap a Nap—this luxurious pillow isn’t exactly a “gadget” per say but its innovative yet highly simply design will blow any sleep-deprived mother away. This is because it acts as three items in one: a plush pillow that allows her to sleep comfortably even in the most awkward places and position— like upright in an office chair during her lunch break; earmuffs to silence unwanted noises like a spouse’s snoring; and a blindfold to block out sun’s rays to ensure she sleeps in a little longer when the kids are away. Price:$14.99
4. iWatchz Q series Watchband for iPod nano— this small “clip” attaches to any iPod nano, easily converting it to a stylish watch. Perfect for mothers who are constantly on the go, she’ll be able to make all of her appointments and know when she’s running late for the next PTA meeting while having access to her music library at all times. She can either use the built-in preferences on her iPod to choose particular backgrounds for her watch face or choose a standard white or black watch face for elegant occasions. Watch bands come in a variety of colors including black, white, red, blue and pink. Price: $24.95
3. Zumba Fitness for Nintendo Wii—Perfect for mothers who are trying to get into shape but don’t have the time to go the gym to take professional classes, Zumba Fitness from Majesco Entertainment is a sure fire way for a mother to tone up and exercise in the comforts of her very own home. The game includes 9 different dance styles: Reggaeton, Merengue, Salsa, Cumbia, Hip-Hop, Mambo, Rumba, Flamenco and Calypso. Price: $34.96 at Wal-Mart retail stores.
2. G2x by LG Android—If mom doesn’t have a smart phone yet then it’s about time that she’s upgrades. The G2x is the currently the hottest and most demand phone in the biz, but it’s only offered to T-Mobile costumers. This ultra sleek 4-G touch screen has a dual processor which enables it to perform at high speeds. It runs on the Android 2.2 (froyo) operating system though it is rumored to get the Gingerbread update soon. Price: $99.99 with 2 year T-mobile contract
1. iPad 2—The new and improved ultra light weight iPad2 is the ultimate gift to give this mother’s day. With it, she can do everything from writing to-do lists, catching up on some reading, video chatting with her relatives that live on the other side of the country, to even watching how-to-cooking shows on YouTube when preparing meals in the kitchen. She can even pull up educational games whenever the kids are bored. Price: Starts at $499.00
Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She
loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.
I have written in the past about a company called Quirky where product ideas are submitted by people like you and me, developed by people like you and me, and then sold to people like you and me. I love Quirky and I’m a fairly regular contributor (and earner). In fact, I returned to my office today to find an unexpected package from the company. I love surprises.
Quirky Wrapster
Wrapster is a single piece of durable plastic that is uniquely designed to help you wrap up your ear bud headphones. In the video further down the page, I show how it works.
Retailing for $6.50, it’s a cheap way to keep your headphones from getting tangled up. It also boasts the ability to use it as an iPhone stand as well, but I couldn’t get it to hold my iPhone 4 up. Despite being unable to use it as a stand, I enjoyed it for the hour I owned it until my wife claimed it as her own.
Quirky Cordies
One of Quirky’s earlier products has been revamped and is shipping again. Cordies, coming in at $12.99 keeps all your cords and cables from falling off the back of your desk.
I showed this one in the video below as well and I was pretty impressed with how well it works. Cordies has a little weight to it to keep it on your desk and in my testing, it held up to some weight on the other end trying to pull the cable down.
Video Demonstrations
Both of the items described above are easy to talk about, but I thought it would be better to just show you how they work. Rather then using the company’s videos, I decided to make my own and put them to a real test. Other than the Wrapster’s bonus feature as an iPhone stand not working out for me, everything worked better than I expected. I also talk about the company as a whole and the awesome shirt they sent me, which I wore immediately.
About Quirky
For those unaware, Quirky is a site that takes ideas from anyone willing to submit them and presents them to the global community via their web site for evaluation. Once ideas have been evaluated by the community and by Quirky staff, one or more are selected to go through the development process. This process includes several smaller submission/evaluation rounds to flesh out things like the industrial design, colors, name, etc. Quirky also asks the community to participate in surveys and other ways to help define the end product. Eventually, a product is presented for pre-sales commitments and if enough sell, it goes into production and ships to buyers and stores.
The beautiful part is how people make money on the site. People make money by earning “influence” in a product. That influence translates into a percentage of the sale price of each unit sold for the item the influence is earned on. As an example, I have some influence in Wrapster, so I earn a wee tiny amount of money on each and every Wrapster sold. It’s very tiny, but 87,000+ Wrapsters later, it’s adding up nicely. The most influence is given to those who present the ideas and the least to those who just vote or help guide the development, but it all earns. I’ve only earned real money little bits at a time with the voting and guiding, but have made a few hundred dollars so far. Others have made thousands. Check it out for yourself if you haven’t yet.
I love to travel… I don’t get to head out of town often, but when I do, I need my technology. Being away from my computer for more than a few hours gets me a little twitchy, so road trips have traditionally been hard to deal with. With the iPhone and the almost unmanageable list of applications to choose from, things have gotten much better. I just got back from a road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Long Beach, CA, where Michelle and I stayed on the Queen Mary for an extended party, and my iPhone helped a lot when it came to relaxing and getting things done. Here’s a list of ten must-have iPhone applications for your road trip.
Google Maps
One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.
Pandora
My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…
Email
Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.
TweetDeck
While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.
Weather
It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.
Safari
Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.
Gazette
I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.
Camera
I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.
FlickIt
One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.
WiFiTrak
WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.
Bonus : RDP
What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.
I’m no DJ, but I know cool tech when I see it, and when I was sent a Tonium Pacemaker to review, I had a good feeling I’d like it. The Pacemaker is essentially a music player with dual outputs, a large hard drive, and mixing capabilities crammed into a tiny package. It’s like a DJ’s travel kit. Having mostly no clue how to really DJ, I decided to enlist the help of local musician and club DJ, Brian Forge for this review.
It’s got the look
Part of being a DJ is your image and who doesn’t want hardware that looks cool? From the pacemaker itself right down to every detail of the packaging, Tonium put out a great looking product. When you open the box, everything in it is in it’s own special place and in it’s own smaller black box, including the user manual which is also black and made to look cool. This thing oozes cool every step of the way. The Pacemaker is all black and it’s small… like, cell phone small. Well, maybe a little bigger than my iPhone, but for DJ equipment, that’s not much of a footprint.
Immediately noticeable are the two main components of the Pacemaker on its face: the display on top and the touch control on the bottom. The color display packs in a lot of information while you’re mixing, and looks pretty good. The touch interface is pretty smooth after you figure it out. Before you figure it out, it’s pretty frustrating trying to make anything happen, but it doesn’t take long to learn. Between the display and the touch pad is a touch slider to control the blending of the left and right tracks and with it are some more controls. On the side is a button that you can slide up for the headphone output. One end has the output and power jacks while the other end has the power button, a menu button, and the USB port. Inside this tiny package they’ve crammed a 60GB hard drive and I’ve seen other reviews with claims of 120GB drives.
The software and community Speaking of the internal hard drive, that’s where the software for your laptop or desktop is kept. No CD needed. Just plug the Pacemaker in and it prompts you to install the mix software on your PC. Don’t try it on Windows 7 RC1, though, because Brian did and it did not play very nice. It’s not an official release of the OS, so I didn’t expect it to. On XP, however, the software installed and offered some pretty cool features. It did have some problems dealing with us loading up the same track multiple times and trying to overlap it, but it also smartly prevented us from adding conflicting affects to the same spot on the timeline. The software, like the Pacemaker, is well-designed and has a lot to offer the rising DJ.
Better still is the mix community. Tonium is plans for this device to not replace all the expensive pro equipment, but rather to provide an open doorway for amateur DJs and those of us who just want to play. One of the great things about the device is that, aside from the obvious loading of tracks onto the Pacemaker, you can import and export mixes, completely layered with the cue points and blends you or another mixer created. So let’s say you throw down an awesome mix and you’re proud of it and want to share. You can export the mix to your computer and upload it to the mix site where others can listen, download and rate it. How’s that for community interaction? If it’s good enough, your mix might get featured and linked to from the newsletter. The mix site is a great idea that will surely help some newbies feel more comfortable with the Pacemaker.
Forge to the rescue
When found this thing in my mail box, my first thought was of how cool it was and if I could keep it (sadly, no), and my second thought was, “I’m not a DJ. How am I going to really review the capabilities of this thing?” So I called in a DJ. Brian Forge has been DJing for a long time and has been asked to guest DJ in other cities and over the weekend, he was nice enough to drop by the office for a few hours and try out the Pacemaker.
The Pacemaker is a great little piece of equipment. It features many, if not more, features than you find with standard CDJ units. All the basics are covered and there are many other FX available to play with. The interface does take some time to get used to though. I only had a short time to familiarize myself with the features and functions but as I caught on, I was able to navigate rather well. I could easily see myself using this while traveling. Whether to practice certain mixes, experiment with ideas, or even practicing and keeping myself entertained, this would come in handy. I do feel there are certain limitations though. I was not impressed with the way their cue system is set up. It makes it difficult to properly set cue points. It is a bit cumbersome to navigate a track once you set a cue point and even more difficult to reset one once it is laid. As with CDJs, you can only lay down one cue point at a time. Because navigation is a bit tricky, controllerism is a moot point with the Pacemaker. You will not be able to scratch or bring in FX on the fly. You have to hit the switch, and perform the most accurate of finger movements to just bring up the right FX, let alone control them. However the touch interface does seem to work well for basic DJing. Especially the crossfader. With proper practice, the sensitivity allows for some clean and accurate cutting between tracks.
Overall, I think this is an amazing little device. The limitations I have seen I believe are purely because of how hard it is to pack everything in to such a small, sleek little package. I definitely see myself wanting to pick one up as a “toy” and as a backup device, should my primary decks fail. I could easily see this being used by DJs on the road, by rising DJs honing their skills on the fly, and even people that host parties who want a DJ without going through the effort of hiring a professional.
Thanks, again, to Brian for his insight.
Conclusions
The first thing I think about is the price. It’s not exactly cheap, but it’s not expensive by comparison, either. For an aspiring DJ, it’s a pretty good price and a nice portable device. For a pro, it’s a great travel companion, like Brian said. If nothing else, you could save a mix and DJ a party at the drop of a hat. The usefulness of it seems to stop just short of professional needs, but is pretty complete for a beginner and I really enjoyed the amount of attention Tonium payed to details ever step of the way. Definitely worth the money if you have it to spare.
