Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! We know that between the traffic jams, mall moms on a mission, kids who’d rather be elsewhere, and the sheer crush of holiday cheer, it can be hard to find a little time to get your head straight and find the gifts that really count. The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Every time the holidays roll around, we put together this list to make shopping for the tech lovers in your life a little simpler — it’s our way of helping out in these hectic months.

This year, we’re taking a new approach to the guide; in the past we’ve always done the selections by person (him, her, etc.), but we think there’s a better way. Starting this year, we’re breaking down the guide by product category (smartphones, laptops, TVs and the like), and grouping those picks into price ranges — so you can find something easily, no matter how much you have to spend. The HGG is a series of smaller guides, but the picks will be collected in a landing page which can be helpfully sorted by price and category (which will be up soon). We’ll publish a new guide every few days through Christmas (things are kicking off today with e-book readers), so you’ll have plenty of time to shop around online and in stores, and we do suggest you check out all the guides — especially since you never know when you’ll find something you want for yourself.

Enjoy, and happy holidays!

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Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide, 2009! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the holidays fast approaching, wireless carriers are rolling out new phones each day, sometimes two at a time. To get into the spirit, AT&T on Monday added the LG Shine II and the BlackBerry Curve 8520 to its lineup.

The LG Shine II will be available on November 22 for $119.99 after mail-in rebate with a two-year contract. The Shine II, naturally, has many similarities to the original LG Shine. The new phone is a 3G slider with a 2.2-inch mirror LCD screen, stereo Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera, and Java 2.0 support.

We generally liked the BlackBerry Curve 8520 on T-Mobile, and we expect AT&T will give the slightly lower-end device a similar treatment. The Curve 8520 offers Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixel camera with video recording, and the new trackpad (which replaces the trackball.) The phone will be available “in the coming weeks” for $99.99 after mail-in rebate with a two-year contract.

While no style maven or template for reference color, the Toshiba AV502U series can do black levels better than most inexpensive LCDs.

The rugged Disney Pix Jr. digital camera is a fun (and safe) way to introduce your children to digital photography. The model my son and I tested is based on the Pixar movie Cars, with Lightning McQueen splashed all over the front panel (a “Princess” version is available as well). My four-year-old had a terrific time learning and playing with this rugged 1.3-megapixel camera—particularly since I was there to help.

With Monday here, it’s time to wrap up last week’s theme This Cyborg Life, a look into the future of the machine called Man.

Yes, that means saying goodbye to Aimee Mullins. She was with us for three essays, all of which dealt with issues of prostheses from unexpected perspectives, that few of us will soon forget. In case you missed any, have a look:

• Is Choosing a Prosthesis So Different than Picking a Pair of Glasses?
• Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be?
• Normal Was Never Cool: Inception of Perception

Of course, what we really tried to explore is the notion that “prosthetics” aren’t just carbon fiber limbs. Is a smartphone with a Bluetooth headset anything but? Using technology to augment ourselves physically and mentally is now a regular part of our agenda, and will be more and more integral to our selves in the coming decades, from implantable computers to programming our body’s biological robots to do our bidding.

A big thanks to Aimee Mullins, Marc Hodosh at TEDMED and all of the other contributors and experts who joined us this week:

• Robot expert and author Daniel H. Wilson – Me and My Exoskeleton: The Trick to Super Strength
• Michael Specter, author and science writer at The New Yorker – Synthetic Biology: Why Not Pursuing Crazy Biotech Is Dangerous
• Author Anna Jane Grossman – Psychic Powers, Cochlear Implants, and My Bionic Ex-Boyfriend
• Dr. Debby Herbenick, author and sexologist at The Kinsey Institute and Indiana University – Becoming a Sexual Cyborg (NSFW)

And in case all of that wasn’t enough, to read all of the stories from This Cyborg Life, use this link.