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If you are like me, you not only wait until the last minute to do your holiday shopping but you tend to overspend at the last minute. Maybe it is the guilt over having waited so long, or a kind of final rush of holiday spirit, but I always opt for the pricier gifts the closer it gets to the big shopping deadline. For those of you like me, here are a few bigger surprises that will give that “Oh, my gosh” moment from a loved one this holiday.
Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 ($299)
$300 for a keyboard combo? What are you kidding me? If you want to get the Ferrari of PC and home theater input devices, then Microsoft defines the high end here. The ergonomic design bends the layout but spares us from the overdone split keyboard design of other “ergo” devices. The real value add here is the excellent backlighting and all-in-one recharging hub. Clearly designed for home theater users of Media Center PCs, the board sits nicely on a lap and can be seen in the dark. There are mouse buttons on the keyboard’s left side, so you don’t need the mouse to do most operations. Unlike others that blend replaceable batteries in the keyboard and a separate recharger for the mouse, this has a single hub that recharges both and offers 4 USB connections. Nice, but we leave it up to you whether the price is worth what you pay for four or more other keyboard combos.
Rock Band ($169.99)
The successor to Guitar Hero is made by GH’s original designers, but now under the Electronic Arts label the guitar controller is joined by a microphone for vocals and a drum kit. I let some veterans of the virtual rock band genre loose on this full kit last week and they liked it a lot. The guitar adds a second set of fret buttons and seems harder. The drums are very difficult to master, with four digital pads and a foot pedal to coordinate. Vocals? Well you have to match a certain pitch and tone to hit it right, but the real hurdle is finding someone with the guts to sing out loud. The song licenses are superb, with legendary air guitar tracks from Nirvana, Metallica, and Queens of the Stone Age among many others. Your kids will love you for getting them this, and you may live to regret hearing the same song misplayed 200 times.
Seagate FreeAgent Pro ($279)
Iogear RAID5 eSATA Controller ($60-$70)
External and backup mass storage is an absolute necessity now that we are putting gigabytes of personal video and photos into our PCs. I have been using the excellent FreeAgent 500GB external disk with a USB port for a while but using a eSATA interface delivers up to 3GBps performance that makes an external device like this perform like an internal drive. Seagate’s drives couldn’t be easier to use. A light bar across the front tells you it is active, and the Pro versions come with software that will automatically duplicate material from your main disk to the external unit for total back up security. Only the latest PCs come with external SATA hard drive connectors, so most of you will want to get an add-on card like Iogear’s PCI-Express card that gives you two external ports. The installation requires only plugging the card in and loading drivers (XP and Vista compatible). Once installed, eSata works much like USB. New devices can be swapped in and out on the fly and be recognized. Now you can have terabytes of data for all the movies, music and images you want, and this drive is fast enough for streaming directly to your network or PC desktop.
Do any of these products sound good for the holidays? Talk about them in our E-Gear Forums.
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