Seiko MessageWatch Street price: $79.95 to $189.95 Phone: 800-724-3585
THIS YEAR THE BIGGEST NEWS IN personal paging comes in a very small package. Like its pocket-size predecessors, Seiko’s MessageWatch will keep you connected, but it will do it with a little more style and a lot more features. The $14.95 monthly fee buys you unlimited local paging and e-mail up to 16 characters long. You can even use the MessageWatch Web site to e-mail yourself reminders. Throughout the day you’ll also be notified of sports scores, ski and surf reports, weather forecasts, lottery numbers, pollen conditions and financial closings from Dow Jones, Nasdaq and Standard & Poor’s. This overachieving wristwatch even tells time more accurately than most by self-adjusting to the National Bureau of Standards’ atomic clock 36 times a day–so you’ll have no excuse for missing that appointment. Does all this sound too good to be true? Well, maybe. While Seiko says it’s planning national coverage soon, service is still limited to the New York City area, southern California, Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Las Vegas.
SONY PlayStation Street price: $149 Phone: 800-345-7669
WITH NO NEW ENTRIES IN THE videogame-console sweepstakes this year, our pick to stuff under the tree: Sony’s PlayStation. It’s a tough call, especially now that all three contenders–PlayStation, Nintendo’s N64 and Sega’s Saturn–have settled down to the why-not price of $149. Itchy-fingered shoppers feeling stumped by the selection should consider: Sony will introduce 150 new titles this year for its machine, compared with 100 from Sega and a relatively paltry 32 from Nintendo. N64 titles still lead the pack in polygons-per-punch–that’s why their games look so good–but the high-quality cartridges cost $10 to $20 more than PlayStation CD-ROMs. Whoever wins, giddy analysts are anticipating a record-smashing season for the industry, a reasonable scenario at these low hardware prices. The wild card: Sega is rumored to be developing an affordable but ultrahigh-end 128-bit system possibly in partnership with–guess who–Microsoft. Sega was mum.
MOTOROLA STARTAC 8600 CELLULAR PHONE Street price: $800 to $1,200 Phone: 888-STARTAC
CELL PHONES ARE getting so sleek and slim that the esthetic is approaching parody. Motorola’s latest cyberbauble, the new StarTac, weighs just 8.1 ounces, hardly more substantial than a Tag Heuer wristwatch and “wearable” if you purchase one of the Motorola-issue holsters, armbands or necklaces sold as accessories. But the new model isn’t just a waif: it includes a built-in answering machine and record feature. StarTac also boasts four hours of talk time and lithium batteries that you can swap for fresh ones in mid-conversation. Its nearest competitor, Qualcomm’s Q-phone, weighs a little more (5.71 ounces) but costs a lot less ($499-$549). As cell phones go, it has all the standard features–provided by Sprint PCS–and service will get beefed up next year when Sprint adds Internet access, short message transmission and fax capability. Both featherweights should add considerable bulk to your cool cache.
MIDISOFT FAMILY MUSIC CENTER Street price: $199.95 Phone: 800-776-6434
YOU’LL HAVE TO USE A LOT OF wraping material to disguise Midisoft’s Family Music Center Keyboard (though it’d make a great stocking stuffer for Sasquatch). Surprise or no, the resident Herbie Hancock will get a kick out of this four-octave programmable keyboard that doubles as a digital studio mixer. The unit comes equipped with two CD-ROM drives and plugs readily into a PC. Once connected, the intrepid student can pound through more than 400 drills using Play Piano, a bundled software program that becomes a personal music teacher through on-screen lessons. When you’re ready to start composing your own etudes, switch to MIDI studio mode. The versatile software lets you write music, record separate tracks for vocals and harmony, and then edit and mix your masterpiece before running a fully synchronized playback. Sharing your opus with friends and family is easy because the MIDI file format is recognized by Web browsers; just upload to your personal Web page. The less wired needn’t fret: the studio can convert your final composition into traditional sheet music.
CANON POWERSHOT 350 DIGITAL CAMERA Street price: $599 Phone: 800-848-4123
THE QUALITY OF PRINTS FROM digital cameras typically range from passable to disappointing–but the ones produced by Canon’s PowerShot 350 are a stunning exception. From camera to computer to paper, the PowerShot images have a dense saturation and even, rich coloring that rivals traditional photography. The beauty part is that you can now fiddle with your digital pictures, like zapping red-eye from the holiday-card family portrait and cropping out the boyfriend you left behind last season. (PowerShot comes with a popular photo-manipulation program called Adobe PhotoDeluxe.) The camera is easy to handle and operate, and is loaded with goodies like a crystal-clear color LCD panel, a video-out cable for TV viewing, a macro mode for extreme close-ups, rechargeable NiCad batteries, AC adapter and enough memory to store up to 47 pictures at once. For even more pictures, snap in the 2MB CompactFlash memory card. Setting up the camera was such a breeze we didn’t need to use the three instruction manuals Canon provides. But beginners will appreciate the help and probably get good use from the company’s 24-hour, seven-day-a-week support line.
‘AUSTIN POWERS’ DVD Street price: $25 Phone: 888-346-3545
GROOVY, BABY! FOR THOSE EARLY adopters on your Christmas list who already have Digital Video Disc (DVD) players hooked up in their home entertainment centers, we recommend “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.” In addition to the usual amenities (letterbox and full-screen format, subtitles in English, French and Spanish), the DVD version of this comedy classic has a tasty menu of extras. Elizabeth Hurley fans can cut straight to the famous melons-and-sausage scene (“A mother-daughter talk”). Or you can add Mike Myers’s and director Jay Roach’s running commentary to the movie. Then there are the six sequences that were cut from the final release; our favorite: “Cheeses of the World Series.” And don’t miss “Music to Shag To,” an original animated sequence. Oh, behave!
ROLODEX REX PC COMPAION Street price: $129 to $179 Phone: 888-REX-6400
WITH THE ADVENT OF THE REX, a new personal digital assistant from Franklin Electronics, we’re sensing the birth of a new religion. REX worshipers will tell you that the remarkable size of this PDA–so small you could conceal it under a credit card–outweighs the disadvantage of not being able to enter data into the unit itself. In order to get information into the tiny device, you plug it into a standard laptop card slot or a docking station that connects to a PC’s communications port. Then you download your contacts, appointments, memos and to-do lists in a swift update that can be performed as often as you make changes. The LCD is not backlit, but the characters are as crisp as a laser print and easy to read even in poor light. Once your REX is juiced up, slip it in your front pocket or billfold and you’ve got the equivalent of a stuffed Filofax (the most powerful model holds about 2,500 entries) at your finger-tips. As a bonus, the True Sync information manager by Starfish Software that comes with the REX is itself so well designed that it may well replace your current scheduling program.
ALPHASMART 2000 keyboard Street price: $249 Phone: 408-252-9400
THE CUPERTINO-BASED Intelligent Peripheral Devices is marketing this slim, lightweight keyboard as an easy-to-use word processor for students. We also like it for taking notes on the phone or in meetings, and for business trips where you have to travel light. The small, deep teal-colored keyboard has eight files that together store up to 64 pages of single-spaced text. You can easily transfer your work to a desktop: it comes with cables for the Mac and PC that plug right into the keyboard port, and then you just push a button and the words spill directly into your word processor. You can also send text to selected printers. Compared with the two earlier versions of this product, the 2000 has a slicker design, longer battery life and added features like spell checking and auto shutdown. There’s also a timer to assess typing speed. And it is durable, so younger kids can bring it on the school bus. Our only suggestion: make the keys quieter.
SONY SPP-SS960 DIGITAL SPREAD SPECTRUM PHONE Street price: $199 Phone: 800-222-SONY
IF YOUR OLD cordless phone fuzzes out when you walk it into the kitchen, perhaps it’s time for an upgrade. The technology has advanced quite a bit over the years. This season Sony retroduces its “spread spectrum” phone, which greatly increases talking range of its earlier 900-MHz digital model. In our office tests, we snaked down quite a few hallways and up a flight of stairs and maintained clear voice quality before the signal failed. The phone is also long on nifty features like caller-ID read-out, one-thumb access to a directory of 50 names and numbers, and automatic scanning for the best channel. Now for the kitchen test…
FRITZ 5 CHESS Street price: $88 Web: www.chessbase.com
THERE ARE ALMOST AS MANY CHESS programs as there are variations of the Ruy Lopez opening. But if you want the one that was used to illuminate the strategies of the Deep Blue-Kasparov clash before an auditorium of spectators, Fritz is the answer. The latest version of this product of Germany, Fritz 5, has a talking coach, on-the-fly game analysis, a “blunder check” capability, a database of 100,000 games and a dazzling library of opening moves. Beginners will find Fritz a wonderful teaching tool and experienced players will grind their teeth down as Fritz tenaciously frustrates their every gambit.
