Christmas  Gift Ideas for Geek and Dudes

So it’s Monday morning and a year to the day of the first post I’ve decided to edit this one and add and subtract  a product or two so, here are a few gift ideas for dudes and geeks.

Looking for Xmas gifts for ones dad or brother, or boyfriend or husband  at Christmas is never easy – I’m not saying this post will make that task any easier either and most of these ideas for Christmas gifts are quite probably a little out of the budget range for some, but…,you might be feeling generous so what the hey. There’s a mixed bag ranging from a tenner up to a couple of k, so fill your proverbial boots and happy Christmas shopping! 

Zagg Sparq Ipad/ Iphone Dual USB Charger

First off, a damn handy present for iPhone heads like me would be a
iPad iPhone Dual Portable Charger in the manufacturers words “Energize your digital life with four times the portable power: the ZAGGsparq 2.0 is the standard for on-the-go charging. Convenient for travelers and business people, it carries four complete recharges for most power-hungry smart phones. The ZAGGsparq 2.0 recharges with a standard outlet and provides two USB ports for powering mobile devices. Perfect for everything from cell phones to hand-held gaming systems. Dead batteries and expensive spares are a thing of the past.” Looks pretty good if you ask me!

150 things every man should know

We men like random stuff, so here’s a book that looks a lot of fun and is probably going to be a big success -”150 Things Every Man Should Know: Telling You the Things Your Best Friend Can’t” .  Fundamentally a lot of us are a little bit dumb and could do with reading stuff like this, just to remind ourselves or save face of asking a smartass who does. Not quite worked out the how to shave without cutting yourself bit yet? (see below for another answer)  or not sure of your ‘having a piss etiquette’ or what about more mundane topics  ‘tie tying’, ‘tyre changing’ . The dude it seems has written a book to solve all these woes. I haven’t read it, but if I got it in my Xmas stocking, then I’d probably smile and read it.

Macbook Pro

I must say I’ve always like Apple products , they are stylish, reliable, cool and geeky. My daughter has a mac book, she’s had it for a while. I’ve never used it but it does have a certain style and difference to it that for whatever reason, traditional PC manufacturers just haven’t quite managed to emulate.  We had a visitor to the office the other day who was raving about the coolness of his new apple macbookpro saying how fast and light and generally brilliant it was and I must confess I did start to think, hmmn, I see where he’s coming from.

In any case, you can buy a Macbook Pro for as little as £749 for a 13inch or for £1795 you can get a new MacBook Pro 17inch with its 2.8GHz processor 4GB ram 500GB hard drive.

iPhone 4

Next up on my I’d love to have is the IPhone4 – I still have an iphone 3g, – I like it, it’s very cool, it has bundles of apps and does lots of cool stuff. It is kinda deficient though in some respects, it’s missing the whole video thing. I can’t upload video content to places like youtube and posterous,  it isn’t as fast and it’s really crap for battery time. That said, it’s an amazing piece of technology that I can read emails on,  read webpages, tweet, facebook, audioboo etc.

So please, any budding Father Christmas’s out there who’d like to treat me to one,  I’m pleased to tell you that you can buy the  iphone 4 new from  £610-00. Yep, a lot of money for a phone, but this is no ordinary phone after all. This is a phone on steroids.

Android Phone

Or maybe you don’t like Apple stuff – perhaps you are turned off by the whole idea and want something a little bit more flexible – Android smartphones look pretty cool and their functionality is pretty much on par with iPhones.

I’ve seen a few videos over the past year or so, one in particular that caught my eye was augmented reality – in plain speak this a feature that overlays what your camera see with map and locational data. So lets say that you are in location x and want to get a better feel for where you are, then this phone hooks up with things like Google street view and has the ability to label places and reconfigure the vista as you move. Another neat function was the ability to hook it up to Google base and get prices from shoips without even entering the store – need to get the best priced camera in Tottenham Ct Road? No problem just walk down the street, enter the product name, point and scan the high street and the various prices will flash up on your screen overlaid on the shop it locates. This HTC Hero Sim Free Android Smartphone is listed at £369.99 from amazon.

Braun Series 7 Shaver

I hate shaving, most men do. Show me a man who enjoys a shave and I’ll show you a man who erm..has too much time on his hands. My daily shave ritual usually entails, lathering up, plugging in a new mach 3 shaver head bought at the exorbitant price of around £9 for 5 shaves. Every now and then ( more often than not) I cut myself. It’s a pita – face bleeds, tissue gets stuck to said cut, and you sit on the train looking like the dummy who cut himself shaving again. So, no more of that methinks, it’s time to save on my shave! ( ok poor choice of pun but you get the enthusiasm, no? ) Enter the Braun Series 7 790cc Shaver in addition to the fact it has the words 790cc in its title ( WTF motorbike engine size speak) it also sounds like it belongs in a start trek episode and is adorned in the same colours as what miss 7 of 9 used to wear. It has  an almost robot R2D2 look to it, leading me to conclude that the designer was definitely a trekkie and star wars fan too. It isnt cheap mind, but over time It would certainly save some time, pain and money too.  It’s priced at £165 ( reduced from the RRP price of £249.99) so even if you spend just £5 per week to shave, you’ll be quids in within a year and have less war wounds too. Jesus look at me, I sound like a fonkin salesman.

X Rocker Pro Gamer Seat

I like the look of this – I might even buy Jord one for Christmas. Its a seat for gamers. I’m not that much of a gamer myself, but I could just nestle down and have more of a go with this thing. It has surround sound, sub woofers, wireless, it even vibrates too which is bound to push any gamer experience up a notch, and for fat boys like me, might even be adaptable to some kind of massage game. Do they sell massage games for Xbox? You can buy the X-Rocker Profor £129.99 or get it at boys stuff for £199.

So there you have it, just a few ideas for xmas gifts. If you happen to make a purchase from any of these links I should point out that I do get a small commission ( painfully small I might add). That said I have shopped around and believe it or not amazon in most cases was often cheapest simply because of the various relationships its established with product providers.

I can’t tag this post, my db is borkden, so please no whinges or whines about my lack of categorisation or tagging, ta! Happy shopping!.

Related posts:

1. Will Apple Approve or Reject the Spotify App?

Update: Awesome Approved

There’s a lil bita buzz in the twitter and blogosphere today over the whole spotify app approval thing with Apple and iTunes.

To be honest, I’ve no idea what’s going to happen – I don’t know, Apple top execs do, Spotify insiders prolly have an inkling ( and a strategy) but that’s about all I can deduce from these 969k or so blades of grass in my garden.

What I do know is that Spotify is absolutely kick, I mean, I seriously love it to death – fast, useful, free or cheap, and has literally changed the way I access and listen to music.

I was an avid, blip.fm and last.fm user, for a time; but both offered restrictions to market, or offered urls to iTune purchaes that didn’t work. Today I use them, but only for the community value add sense.

See, I like quirky, obscure, niche stuff that, doesnt really have a mass market and is prolly quite hard to find too. Prior to these services, I had to be content w/ a little judge jules or ancient Danny Rampling to fire up my old skool house dancey shoes.

We all love the iPhone Yada Yada Yada

I won’t go off on one about how great the iPhone is either, I’m a confessed iPhonoholic often seen w/ head bowed tapping away or grinning inanely at some random cussive tweet from a random person w/ too much time on their hands too,if it isn’t that, then I’m usually annoying the person on a train seat next to me w/ a reflexive over-volumised bass tinctured reverb or two. Bought and paid for ( honest guv) from  iTunes or from a mates new found old piece of vinyl, masterly digitised and available for download oft tinternet. ( A mate for the purpose of this piece, is anyone who loves house/techno/hip hop/ dance and just so happens to have stored it online somewhere, for convenience of course)

So imagine my delight having already played with Spotify as a desktop app and finding the various bits and bobs  like the ability to stream choons  and listen to them instantly for free, in learning that they’d developed an app that would enable for the same!

Wow, said I, how amazingly cool will that be! My own playlists, and even Shared Playlists accessible from the cloud, w/ a great interface, no fannying around,  pre-caching abilities and all for less than the price of four pints of lager in the Crown or a random Irish bird talking about her backend every so often by way of adverts – winner winner chicken dinner.

Yet, when you look closer you begin to hear the slow winding sound of the cat on your turntable, driving that top notch tune to a halt – stop we say, like yeah right, Apple soooo aren’t going to grant Spotify app status in a zillion years, not w/ out risking massive potential damage to its bottom line.

iTunes can be a pain in the arse – if your computer dies, or you want to migrate to another PC or MAC even, then to take your choons and migrate it all is little short of agony, with a dollop of time added for good measure, yet we  still use it, cos by and large, it’s the only real way of getting our stuff onto our iPhones and dulling our mind numbingly boring treks into the office.

Sure, if our file is small enough and we’ve managed to jump through all the hoops AND maintained our connection then sure, we can get tunes on the go, and sample a new sound or two, but it isn’t easy ,  it’s a pain in the arse. The Spotify app on the contrary looks to be anything but.

Music, accessible, simply.

So getting back to the question I started w/ – what will Apple do? Will they approve or reject?

Approving Spotify

On the face of it, it really doesn’t really make a lot of sense for them to approve the thing, Turkeys really wouldn’t vote for xmas given the chance.

What value, other than a miniscule amount of one time skimback would the inclusion of Spotify add to the bottom line of Apple? Moreover, what damage could the Spotify app do to the bottom line of Apple?

Frighteningly scary idea number one: If just 1% of people decided to say, “hmmn, you know, Apple, poke your £9 fee for that album download, I’ll go with Spotify and rent the rights to listen to the thing instead and listen to things that I want to, when I want to, rather than buy some random bit of plastic that gets scratched or I’ll get bored w/” then the cost to Apple would be huge.

Frighteningly scary idea number two: Adopters like those mentioned previously, usually have a good little network of people who look to them for ideas and new cool things on the block. Before long, such adopters would probably be heard saying in various forms of accent, “you know what dude, you really need to save yourself a few quid and liberate your bank balance from the tyranny that is iTunes”

Frighteningly scary idea number three: The world awakens as a result and realises that cd’s are old hat and just silly in 2009, ups sticks and moves on.

Rejecting Spotify

So Apple do the expected and say “fonk that for a game of hairy mary’s” reject stamp, sorry Spotify, clause xyz precludes us from accepting that apps that yada yada yada…

But would that be the end of it? Could Apple really get away w/ such a position? Is not restraint of trade the first thing that springs to mind? And what about the market? Can the market really be bucked in this way? In fact why isn’t/hasn’t iPhone furiously devved an alternative? Is it not a no brainer almost? An app that stores music in the cloud that people can stream from and access from anywhere – or maybe it isn’t that simple, perhaps the whole cloud music to mobile device idea is locked away and owned by Spotifyand Apple, cognisant of this are crying pins and needles unable to move and adapt…

I don’t know, IANAL (always wanted to say that) and I know very little about trademark law or music law( as I’m sure is abundantly clear) or any of that other restrictive/protective bs other than that I’ve read at Techcrunch or through some other random blog somewhere so I’ll leave that bit there.

What I would say though is that for Apple, Spotify, the Music industry and the consumer at large is that a real opp exists for the 3 main players in this little shindig, to sit down and sort something out, be that through app embedded buy now, rev share, iTune links or a bigger slice of the Spotify pie with share options and whatever other compromise the smartest mover can place on the dumbest shaker, really does seem like the only viable option open – anything less will show it all up for the sham of a rip off that the status quo is.

Finally, none of this is really new, at least not from the perspective of the desktop. Napster showed the way w/ peer to peer and heck it rocked, rocked so hard in fact that they were eventually forced to comply or die to the demands of Sony et al, all of whom quaked at the thought of this freeness thing running riot. People like Daniel Ek ( Spotify CEO ) have long seen the  writing on the wall , and puts it well asking almost “why wouldn’t they, (the music industry)  see it any other way” .  They all know the game is up, they can’t keep mugging people off with ridiculously high priced glossy packaged plastic, especially when people have other options.  Apparently, 90% of online music is still obtained by non paid ‘illegalz meanz’, showing that there’s still massive demand for the stuff, even if they aren’t paying for it – put simply, try as they do, they can’t shut it down, they can’t stop people sharing music, downloading it for free etc, coz at its heart, the current system sucks arse and no one likes being ripped off.  Consumers, given the option will vote w/ their feet.  I like Spotify, game changers ftw

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