Hasta La Gadget!

There are three different ways you’re going it give the gift of audio this holiday season, the first being the massive amount of smart devices out there with their own external speaker – so many do these days that it’s taken for granted – see: all of the smartphones, notebooks, and tablets we’ve worked with for several years – they’re all able to play music, imagine that! The second way you’re going to give the gift of audio is with speakers galore, starting with the Jawbone BIG Jambox and/or the Jawbone Jambox standard edition – or with custom color combinations if you wish with the company’s new “The Remix” initiative – it’s fun stuff!

Stand-alone speakers are almost always a good gift for that random person in your life in need of a “just because” gift: check the iFrogz Boost Nearfeild audio speaker for example. If you’ve got a smartphone, not even necessarily if you’ve got an iPhone, your gift receiver will be amazed at the hot sound enhancement that occurs with this fabulous unique technology. We also suggest you take a peek at House of Marley for some bright and fabulous audio equipment – see their showing in our Redemption Song on-ear headphones review as well as our review of the massive Bag of Rhythm. Noone else will have those gifts to give at your party, you can bet!

Other highly approved stand-alone speakers we’ve had a peek at and enjoyed include, first, the SuperTooth Disco 2 – the original Disco and the Disco 2 remain out and about in our office on the regular. They’re out because they’re extremely simple to use and they’re both compact in shape – they’re just that nice. The Libratone Zipp has been an entirely reliable speaker made to work first and foremost with wireless commands from your iPhone or iPad.

Another of the most unique and creative of speakers we’ve got here is HiddenRadio – a speaker that connects to your smartphone (if you wish) then plays music louder or softer based on how high or low the knob is on the device. For those of you who want to go just about as wireless as a non-battery device will bring you, you’ll want to see the Sonos collection for music in your home – and stay tuned to SlashGear for a review of the Sonos SUB – it’s bumping right now for real.

For those of you that don’t want to spend too much cash but do want to afford a pair of headphones rather than a tiny pair of earbuds, there’s always the greatness of Tenqa Remxd – a hot ticket indeed for very, very few dollars from you. Moving up the scale as far as headphone quality goes we’ve got (in no particular order), Marshall Major Pitch Black headphones, ThinkSound ms01 monitor series earbuds, the Jabra Supreme-UC Bluetooth headset (wireless greatness), and don’t forget the Monster Inspiration Active Noise Cancellation Headphones – they’re beastly!

The folks at Plantronics have been hitting it correct this year with gems such as the BackBeat Go wireless earbuds and the lovely Plantronics m55 bluetooth headset to kick up the market in the quality sector. This year Apple also revealed their own new and updated pair of earbuds called Apple Earpods – they drown your eardrums in lovely warm sound! The team at V-MODA has been coming correct this year too with such beasts as the V-MODA Limited Edition Crossfade LP2 headphones as well as the slightly newer and slightly smaller V-MODA Crossfade M-80 White Pearl headphones – both are powerful and made with extra high-quality materials to boot!

SlashGear 2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Audio Equipment is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In the smartphone universe you’re going to have some sorting to do starting with the carrier your gift receiver is working with. More than likely you’re a parent or a significant other if you’re purchasing a smartphone on-contract for that special someone, this meaning you’ve got a fair understanding of which carrier they’ll be working with. After that, it’s all about finding the best device for them based on their specific wants and needs.

The first and probably most obvious place your mind should be wandering to is the iPhone. With this Apple hero device landing on three major carriers with the launch of the iPhone 5, it’s almost a given at this point in our western society that a person wouldn’t mind receiving an iPhone as a gift. If your special someone is out of the iPhone universe specifically for one reason or another, you’ll want to head down one of two paths: Android or Windows Phone.

With Windows Phone 8 came the launch and relative re-birth of Nokia in an extremely vibrant and fun-loving wave of devices that hit most major carriers in the USA. The biggest and the best of these devices is the Nokia Lumia 920 which is exclusive to AT&T at the moment. After that you’ve got the Nokia Lumia 822 from Verizon, the Nokia Lumia 820 from T-Mobile, and more than likely one or two more additions to the Lumia line before the end of the year. Another heavy contender in this space is the HTC Windows Phone 8X carried by AT&T as well as Verizon and T-Mobile.

As for Android, you’ve got a fierce battle going on between lines and heroes, with four titans making up the entirety of our selections for best-of-the-moment. The most recent big-name drop has been the Google Nexus 4, one of two of LG’s recent beast releases. LG also brings on the Optimus G with AT&T 4G LTE, a slightly more high-powered version of the hardware brought on in the Nexus 4, both of them working with one of the most powerful processors on the market, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro. This Google hero phone is sold as a 2-year-contract-holding T-Mobile Nexus 4 and as a no-contract Nexus 4 sold online via the Google Play store – they’re both exactly the same device, just different prices based on data plan acceptance.

HTC came out swinging this year and didn’t let up all the way through to Fall with the HTC DROID DNA with Verizon 4G LTE, the current record holder for highest-definition-display on a smartphone. It’s backed up by the whole HTC One crew, leading off with the brand new HTC One X+ for AT&T, a a much more high-powered version of the original with a fantastic NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor in it – hot stuff! The original version is still out there as the HTC One X (without the +), exclusive to AT&T here in the USA. Next in line is the slightly smaller HTC One S carried by T-Mobile in the USA – this device has been upgraded to a much more awesome casing quite recently – a hot pick! The HTC One V is also floating around out there for those of you looking specifically for the HTC branding but not wanting to drop a ton of bills – though the One S is free at times, depending on when you’re shopping – good luck!

Motorola was purchased by Google earlier this year and since they’ve had that extra bump of influence, they’ve made some fantastic handsets that retain their hardcore hardware build and bust out with a newly refined user interface on the inside. The Motorola DROID RAZR M has one of the smallest bezels on the market, making it appear to be just a wickedly bright display sitting in the palm of your hand. The M’s bigger brother DROID RAZR HD sticks with the greatness that was the original DROID RAZR and boosts the processing power as well as the density of the display. The DROID RAZR MAXX HD crowns the collection with all that good stuff plus a massive, gigantic, beastly battery (and it’s still rather thin!)

Then there’s Samsung. If the person you’re buying a gift for doesn’t want an iPhone, chances are they’ll be entirely stoked to get either a Samsung Galaxy S III or a Samsung Galaxy Note II. The big difference is in the ultra massiveness of the Galaxy Note II, that and it’s build-in S-Pen for writing on the screen. The Samsung family of devices creates a friendly software and hardware compatibility ecosystem the lines of which you’ll only otherwise find at Apple – and that’s saying a lot. The Samsung Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are available on most if not all of the major carriers in the USA and abroad – have a peek at the Galaxy S III here on Verizon as well as AT&T and T-Mobile. The Galaxy Note II we’ve also got several reviews of, hitting on the T-Mobile version and the Verizon version – and keep note that we’ll be taking another look at the Verizon version likely by the time this post is published to see how lovely its data speeds are – otherwise the differences between each of these devices on each carrier is relegated to the carrier-pushed apps and the costs inflicted upon your person. Also the Verizon version of the Note II has a massive beast of a Verizon logo on the front button – it’s fierce!

Another rather odd contender that will certainly surprise your gift-getter is the Nokia 808 PureView running Symbian – that’s not Android, it’s not iOS, and it’s not Windows Phone. This device also has a 41-megapixel camera – truly the most intense camera phone in the history of the world.

SlashGear 2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Smartphones is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The HTC 8S is a Windows Phone 8 handset that’s lightly specced compared to its more powerful sibling, the HTC 8X. The 8X is HTC’s flagship phone based on Microsoft’s mobile OS, and apparently the only one the U.S. market may ever see, according to an official statement from HTC issued late Friday afternoon. The budget 8S won’t make it to U.S. shores, an HTC official told Engadget, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

The HTC 8S is a not a bad-looking piece of hardware, based on the versions I saw at CTIA MobileCon before they were allowed to be displayed running a live version of Windows Phone 8. But inside it’s a device built for a budget: It lacks a front-facing camera, has a much lower resolution display, a weaker rear camera, less RAM and a slower processor than its big brother. The Verge reports that delays in carrier testing of the 8S had already pushed back its retail availability (where it was targeted for T-Mobile), but the new statement from HTC indicates we probably won’t ever see the phone on sale stateside.

The Windows Phone 8X is now said to be HTC’s area of focus on the Windows Phone side for the U.S. market, where it’s sold at AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. While Windows Phone 8 sales are said to be exceeding the launch performance of Windows Phone 7 devices, no one’s putting any firm numbers behind that as of yet. It’s possible that what HTC saw regarding sales of its 8X indicated that the wise course would be to focus on promoting a single WP8-based device in the U.S. market, rather than splitting their focus between two handsets.

Buying a laptop at Christmas is a big-ticket gift, but there are some great options out there if you’ve promised portable computing to someone special. Plenty of people – whether teenagers, students, or parents – are hoping for a notebook in giftwrap this month, and we’ve picked out some of the best to help make your shopping decisions simple. Read on for the SlashGear selection.

If your gift target has a preference for Windows or Mac, they’ll probably have been vocal about it already. If you’re going in blind, whether you opt for a machine running Microsoft’s or Apple’s OS may well depend on your budget. Apple’s MacBook Air line starts at $999, the cheapest portable in the company’s line-up (though there are official refurbs – which the SlashGear team has had good experience with from Apple in the past, being almost indistinguishable from new machines – from $749, albeit from the 2011 range), whereas Windows notebooks can be had much cheaper.

Our budget pick, however, doesn’t run either Windows or OS X – instead it uses Google’s Chrome OS. The $249 Samsung Series 3 Chromebook is a huge step forward over the first-gen Chrome OS machines, delivering Apple-a-like design and lengthy battery life at an impressively low cost. If your gift recipient doesn’t mind living their life in the cloud – and, if most of their time is spent browsing, using Gmail, Facebook, and other popular sites, as most people do – then Chrome OS makes an excellent low-cost option.

If a full OS is essential, then around $500 gets you the Acer Aspire V5 11.6-inch, a good mobility choice. Running Windows 8 and with 500GB of internal storage, the Ivy Bridge powered Aspire V5 starts out with a Core i3 processor, but we’d be tempted to spend the twenty bucks or so more and step up to the Core i5 chip for that bit of extra speed. 5hrs of real-world battery life isn’t segment-leading, but it’s a solid showing for a low-cost ultraportable.

For the mid-range, we have a choice of machines. We thought HP’s Spectre XT ultrabook, with its 13.3-inch display, was great for road warriors, and with the street price now around $800 it addresses our key criticism of price. Those who want a larger display, meanwhile, will find HP’s Envy 4 and 6 (with 14- and 15.6-inch displays respectively) more to their liking, with street prices around $750 and $570. Sony’s VAIO S series is another stylish option, with a 13.3-inch display and a street price around $950.

A 13-inch Windows 8 machine for upward of $1,000 and with an over-rotating hinge might not sound like much, but the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 is perhaps the perfect machine to deliver on Microsoft’s Windows 8 touch experience. Flipping from a great notebook, to an easel-format for comfortable media consumption, and then all the way round to a slate tablet, it ticks all the right mobility boxes with the flexibility of a full copy of Windows 8.

If OS X is the platform on your shopping list, our picks would be the 13-inch MacBook Air and the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The MacBook Air 13, from $1,199, balances extreme portability with decent battery life and performance, with details like flash storage as standard helping keep things moving swiftly. Those looking for a more impressive gift – and an impressive laptop all-round – should look to the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, from $2,199. Its eye-searingly beautiful screen ands powerful specifications are wrapped in a surprisingly portable chassis, and it’s our pick of the top notebooks.

More laptop options in our laptop reviews hub!

SlashGear 2012 Holiday Gift Guide: Laptops is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you ever grew up with the ambition of becoming a rock star, then you might be able to learn to live out that ambition with the $69.99 Mini Electric Guitar Kit. Talk about being a DIY rocker! This particular kit will enable you to build up your very own mini electric guitar, where it sports an integrated speaker, and alternatively, you can still take advantage of the line out feature by using a standard guitar cable to your own amp or pedal among others. Heck, each purchase will even come with its very own guitar pick, now how about that?

You can say that Mini Electric Guitar Kit might be one of the more enjoyable kits you have ever put together, considering how this mini guitar itself has a built-in speaker, letting you jam just about anywhere you want to. The thing is, you would do best to practice at home first before showing off your dazzling array of skills to the outside world, unless you want even the homeless folks on the street to throw rotten apples and other pieces of garbage at you. Heck, you can even do up the copper wire yourself with more than 180 revolutions. The circuit board itself comes pre-assembled without any need for soldering. Get ready a pair of AA batteries to get started!

[ Mini Electric Guitar Kit copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]