The Apple of desire
The new iPhone is hot, writes Alex Bilmes, but it is not the only gizmo in town ne might be forgiven, amid the considerable hoopla, for thinking that there is only one new gadget available to buy in the run-up to what is doubtless known, in Silicon Valley, as the holiday season. And the iPhone is certainly a gizmo to be reckoned with. It's pretty, it's pleasingly tactile and, like everything else made by Apple, it's brilliantly intuitive, with a touchscreen so responsive that it even works with sausage fingers like mine.
Stroll into the cavernous Apple cathedral on Regent Street, pick up a demonstration iPhone, start fiddling and you'll soon be retouching family photos, poking Facebook friends, downloading the Radiohead album, studying the racing form, checking your emails and editing a Bafta-worthy short film. You might even find time for a phone call. The iPhone does everything you'd expect from a mobile phone and much more — even in 2007, when we expect mobile phones to mix the drinks, stuff the turkey and offer a nick-of-time refutation of Richard Dawkins's teachings on religion before we sit down to our annual papercrowned lunches. All for £270.
Still, as a gift it has its flaws. First off, buying it necessitates signing an 18-month contract with 02, which is a strikingly generous thing to do on someone else's behalf. It's also rather presumptuous — what if they are already embroiled with Orange or Vodaphone or another service provider? That's why the gadget that all techie-minded types are secretly hoping to find in their virtual stockings is not the iPhone; it's the iPod Touch, which essentially is a considerably slimmer version of the same thing, only without the phone bit. At £270 and with only 16GB of memory, it doesn't hold nearly as many songs as the iPod classic (which has ten times the storage space for £40 less), but no one really needs to have that much music available on the move, and what the Touch doesn't have in memory it makes up for with sheer sexiness.
Those who still want a new phone should know that the iPhone is not the only `smartphone' on the market. The most highly regarded alternative is Nokia's E90 Communicator, which costs a wince-inducing £660 but has absolutely everything one could need (HSDPA, GPS, WiFi, widescreen, 3.2meg camera). Most important, it snaps open to reveal a supremely user-friendly qwerty keyboard.
If the iPhone looks like it's ready to party, the E90 is all business.
Me, I'd rather have a new camera. Most affordable — and perfect if you're buying for a novice — is one of the latest generation of compact digitals, for which one should not have to pay more than £250. All the big camera brands manufacture one. I've got a Nikon Coolpix S7C, which has a big enough three-inch LCD screen and WiFi, so you can send photos straight from camera to PC. It costs £180.
More skilled and adventurous photographers will want a digital SLR. The Olympus E-400 and the Sony Alpha DSLRA100 are both excellent, but I'm a Canon loyalist so I lust after the EOS 400D, which takes superb photos, and is incredibly light and easy to use. It costs £500. Whichever one you go for, make sure it has ten megapixels and doesn't cost more than £600.
There's no definitive games console to chase after this year, unlike last time when everyone clamoured for a Nintendo Wii, but if it's home entertainment that's required — and it's Christmas, so it will be — how about a new DVD player? Thing is, no one buys DVD players any more. They buy HD-DVD players or they buy Blu-Ray players, to get the most out of their High-Definition TVs and the crisp, vibrant images that Hollywood churns out. Until now, it's been difficult to decide which of the formats to go with. Remember the VHS vs Betamax wars of the early Eighties? (I know, who could forget, right?) It's been a bit like that. Even the studios have taken sides, with Paramount and Universal releasing movies only on HD -DVD and Disney, Fox and Sony, among others, supporting Blu-Ray exclusively.
Enter Samsung with its new BD-UP5000 DUO HD, reportedly the best machine so far that can support both HD-DVD (Transformers, Harry Potter) and Blu-Ray (Spider-Man 3, Ocean's 13) discs. It's like being at the local Vue, but without the hoodies, the £5 Diet Coke and the stench of stale sweat.
But my absolute toppermost tip for a gift for a gadget freak is a very dull-sounding thing: the Tomtom Go 720 is simply the best satnav on the market. It has the best touchscreen, the easiest-to-read maps, the most intelligent technology. It costs £330, which is relatively steep — the almost-as-good Sony NV-U82 is only £250 — but not as much as a Maserati GranTurismo your beloved was really hoping for.
And won't it look smart on the dashboard of the Laguna or the Toureg as you sit in traffic on Boxing Day, stuck behind all those nutters on their way to the sales!
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