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Holiday Gift Guide: 12 Must-Have Tech Toys
Published November 29, 2007
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| Photo by: iStockphoto |
In part one of our two-part Holiday Gift Guide, we present a dozen of our best tech savvy gift ideas. From mobile phones to flash drives, wireless printers to digital picture frames, these electronic trinkets are perfect for the entrepreneur who has everything.
By: MATT ALDERTON
'Tis the season for toys, and no matter how old they get, entrepreneurial girls and boys still appreciate playing with them. But when big kids become business owners their letters to Santa Claus start to look a little bit different. While they once coveted plastic trucks and baby dolls, they're now after computers, cell phones and any number of high-tech gadgets and gizmos. If it can make their busy lives easier, more efficient and perhaps a little bit more fun, they'll welcome it when they find it under the Christmas tree.
If you're stumped when it comes to shopping for your favorite small business owner this year, consider the following ideas from the ProNet Small Business Resource Center's first annual Holiday Gift Guide. They won't just inspire smiles; they might actually engender success.
Product: N810 Internet Tablet
Manufacturer: Nokia
Price: $479.99
Buy It: www.nokiausa.com
Nokia's portable Internet Tablet is perfect for on-the-go business owners who need constant and convenient Internet access. Neither a phone nor a computer, it's a perfect "in between" solution. Featuring a slide keyboard, integrated GPS and a built-in Web cam, it also supports VoIP clients like GoogleTalk and Skype. It's as close as you can get to a proper Internet browser outside of your full-sized PC.
Product: Deskjet 460 Mobile Printer
Manufacturer: HP
Price: From $224
Buy It: www.hp.com
HP's Deskjet 460 mobile printer prints 17 black and 16 color pages per minute. Ideal for small business owners who need to print contracts, invoices or funny e-mail forwards from their car, their hotel room or their table at the local Starbucks, the printer features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, not to mention a long-lasting battery that prints up to 450 pages per charge. For an even faster model, hold out until January 2008, when HP will release its next-generation mobile printer, the Officejet H470, which the company is billing as the world's fastest mobile printer.
Product: MOTORIZR Z6tv
Manufacturer: Motorola
Price: $309.99
Buy It: www.motorola.com
Because small business owners can't always leave their office for a TV break, sometimes they've got to bring their TV break to their office. Motorola's MOTORIZR Z6tv makes doing that easy. Paired with Verizon Wireless' V CAST Mobile TV, the phone is a mini entertainment center that's part phone, part digital music player and part television. With it, you can keep up with sports scores, watch the news or enjoy your favorite program. And because the phone includes a 2.0 megapixel camera and video capture, it's ideal for business owners who use media in their business, for functions like blogging, product development and competitive research.
Product: Yego USB Drive
Manufacturer: Ritek USA
Price: From $19
Buy It: www.ritekusa.com
Yego USB drives, which add two additional ports to your computer per USB drive, are ideal, Y-shaped solutions to the problem of limited USB connectivity. They come in three sizes—1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB—and in five colors, allowing users to simultaneously connect to their computer a variety of mobile devices. Plus, they can be used alone or together as thumb drives; connecting up to six 4 GB drives in a Daisy chain will create up to 24 GB of mobile storage.
Product: Pixxa 8-Inch LCD Photo Frame
Manufacturer: Ality
Price: $299.95
Buy It: www.sharperimage.com
Ality's 8-inch LCD photo frame is the best of several worlds; it's got both form and function, for starters, and is the perfect personal effect for your professional workspace. The frame has 512 MB of memory and can store approximately 100 digital photos, which can be browsed quickly and easily thanks to the frame's wireless remote. As a bonus, the frame doubles as an alarm clock and includes a two-channel speaker for playing movies or music. What's more, it includes a calendar function for scheduling certain photos to display on certain days; loaded with customized photos and graphics, it offers a creative and powerful solution for giving oneself visual reminders about important days and milestones, both at home and at work.
Product: D'Light
Manufacturer: Boynq
Price: $19.99
Buy It: www.target.com
Boynq's D'Light is a USB light that features a lampshade that transforms a bright LED light into a soft glow by which to do your work. The light, which sits at the end of a flexible metal arm, connects to your computer via its USB port and is a useful tool for professionals who often work tirelessly into the evening; because the light fully illuminates your screen and your keyboard, it makes working in any ill-lit environment—an airplane, for instance, or your bedroom—more productive, not to mention better for your favorite entrepreneur's eyes.
Product: DocuPen RC800
Manufacturer: Planon
Price: From $299.99
Buy It: www.planon.com
According to Planon, the DocuPen is the world's smallest full-page portable color scanner. The same size as a ballpoint pen, it can scan an entire page of text and graphics in just four seconds. The 2 MB scanner stores up to 100 pages, weighs only 2 ounces and is just 8 inches long; it's rechargeable and downloads scans to your computer via its USB port. If you're a plugged-in entrepreneur—the kind that likes to digitize formal documents like contracts and informal notes from napkins or notebook margins—this is the toy for you.
Product: QL-500 Desktop PC Label Printer
Manufacturer: Brother
Price: $69.99
Buy It: www.brother-usa.com
A label printer makes an excellent gift for sole proprietors who want to make their home office more productive and more professional, as well as more cost-effective. Brother's QL-500 model is affordable, prints 50 labels per minute and, because it uses thermal printing technology, requires absolutely no ink. Use it to print shipping labels, mailing labels, CD and DVD labels, badges and even small signage. It's a time-saver that will make sure you never have to address an envelope by hand again.
Product: iNeed Lumbar Massage Cushion
Manufacturer: Brookstone
Price: $59.95
Buy It: www.brookstone.com
Small business owners are no strangers to stress. They carry it with them daily in their necks, their backs, their feet. Brookstone's iNeed massage pillow, which comes in four colors, delivers a calming Shiatsu massage to the lower back. Super portable—it comes with a streamlined carrying case—you can easily take the pillow with you to the office, where you can strap it to your desk chair, turning on its four dual-rotating massage nodes at a moment's notice in order to melt away the entrepreneurial stress that comes daily from clients, meetings and deadlines.
Product: MindManager 7
Manufacturer: Mindjet Corporation
Price: From $99
Buy It: www.mindjet.com
Available in three versions, Mindjet's MindManager software is a simple tool that can produce big results when it comes to individual and organizational productivity. The software, which works by creating visual mind-maps with which to communicate information and ideas, claims to give users three to five hours per week in productivity gains. An effective tool that promotes both creativity and organization, it can help easily-distracted entrepreneurs focus, transferring their many ideas from cranium to computer.
Product: PlanPlus Online
Manufacturer: FranklinCovey
Price: From $9.95 per month
Buy It: www.planplusonline.com
Not all gifts must come wrapped in a package. Some of the best toys for entrepreneurs are available exclusively online; they can't be held, but they can certainly be used. Take, for instance, FranklinCovey's popular Web-based software, PlanPlus Online. A smart gift for the start-up business owner in your life, it integrates a daily, weekly and monthly planner with project management functions and customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities.
Product: Internet Journal
Manufacturer: Pepperpot
Price: $9.95
Buy It: www.coolcomputerbags.com
While it's not exactly a tech toy, Pepperpot's Internet Journal is certainly a tech toy lover's tool. With 160 alphabetized pages, the journal is the perfect place to write down Web sites, usernames and passwords. Because it includes space for recording Web site name, description, username, password and notes, it's the ideal organizational tool for the tech savvy entrepreneur.
For more holiday gift ideas, view Part Two of our first annual Holiday Gift Guide, which offers 12 perfect on-the-road gifts for the frequent small business travelers in your life.
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