Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s a list of the very best gear we’ve seen this year. It’s more bragger’s guide than buyer’s guide—if you have any of this, you can officially tell your friends to suck on it.

The year winds to an end and every product worth a damn has already hit store shelves—there’s not going to be any new shiny coolness until next month’s CES. We were lucky enough to have a look at most of the best gear out there, and we’ve passed judgment on all that we saw. Here’s a complete list of great products, yanked from our first looks, reviews, and epic Battlemodos:

TV & HOME THEATER
TVs:
Panasonic 65VX100U Plasma
Pioneer Kuro Elite PRO-111FD Plasma
Sony Bravia XBR8 LCD
Panasonic PZ850 Series Plasma
Samsung 650 and 750 Series LCD
Honorable mention for value: Toshiba Regza RV535 Series LCD

Surround Bar:
Yamaha YSP-3050 Sound Bar

Blu-ray Player:
Pioneer Elite BDP-09FD
Samsung Netflix BD-P2500
Sony PlayStation 3

Blu-ray Movies (with iTunes/WMV Digital Copy):
The Dark Knight
Wall-E

CAMERAS & CAMCORDERS
DSLR Cameras:
Nikon D300 and D700
Canon EOS 5D Mark II with HD video
Nikon D90 with HD video
Canon Rebel XSi and Rebel XS
Honorable mention for value: Sony Alpha A900 and Alpha A300

Point and Shoot Camera:
Canon SD790

Crazy Hybrid Camera/Camcorder:
Casio Exilim EX-F1

Mini Camcorders:
Kodak Zi6 HD
Pure Digital Flip Ultra

COMPUTERS & ACCESSORIES
Laptops:
MacBook/MacBook Pro
Lenovo X300
MSI Wind

All-In-One PC:
Vaio LV

Routers:
Linksys WRT610N Dual N-Band Wireless Router

Router/NAS:
Apple Time Capsule

NAS:
HP MediaVault mv2120

Mouse:
Logitech MX 1100 Mouse

Keyboard:
SteelSeries 7G Pro Gaming Keyboard

iPod/iPhone USB Dock:
Griffin Simplifi iPod-iPhone Dock/Card Reader/USB Hub

PHONES & PORTABLE DEVICES
Phones:
Apple iPhone 3G @ AT&T
Sidekick 2008 @ T-Mobile
Samsung Instinct @ Sprint (after firmware update, it’s officially better than Verizon’s LG Dare)
LG Decoy with docking Bluetooth earpiece @ Verizon
Sony Ericsson W890i @ Europe only; unlocked may be available

Phone Stereo Headsets:
Maximo iMetal iP-HS2 Isolators
Shure Music Phone Adapter to use with your current earphones

In-Ear Headphones:
Etymotics hf5
Shure SE110
Ultimate Ears metro.fi 2

Pico Projector:
Aiptek PocketCinema V10

GPS:
Garmin Nuvi 785T with lane guidance
Garmin Nuvi 880 with speech recognition

ASSORTED CRAZY STUFF
Flashlights:
Wicked Lasers Torch Flashlight
Duracell Daylite CR123

Toy Robot:
U-Command Wall-E

Cheap Night Vision Goggles:
Jakks Pacific EyeClops

Unmanned Vehicle:
Draganfly X6 UAV

Spy Gadget Book:
Spycraft by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton

Water Guns:
Super Soaker Sneak Attack 4-Way

—With reporting by Erica Ho

The weekly Thank Giz It’s Friday lists are about unwinding and having fun. I hope you have enjoyed reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them. Here is the best of the bunch.

•10 Sex Toys That Are Confusing and Wrong (NSFW): A roundup of NSFW toys that are pointless, vulgar, confusing and (in some cases) scary.

•10 Gadget Get-Ups For Guys That Don’t Mind Looking Like a Tool: This is a gadgety fashion guide for guys secure in their geekyness.

•10 Gadgets That Transform Your Bathroom Into a Home Office: Studies show that Americans like to take their work into the bathroom. I’m just giving you guys what you want.

•10 Gadgets That Will Trip You Out Without Drugs: Who needs drugs when there are gadgets that can tap into the psychedelic potential of your brain?

•10 Gadgets That Provide Perpetual Pleasure: These gadgets can simulate a pleasurable experience on demand.

•10 Gadgets For Instant Portable Partying: Big plans for the weekend? Everyday can be the weekend with these gadgets.

•10 Gadgets That Make You Less Physically Repulsive: These gadgets can get you cleaned up, toned up and *ahem* beefed up for the ladies.

•10 Gadgets For Guys That Hate to Cook (But Love to Eat): These gadgets help you eat like a king at home with as little effort as possible.

•10 Gadgets That Help You Survive In Cheap Hotel Rooms: Traveling this holiday season? These gadgets can help you stay alive even in the most disgusting hotels.

•10 Gadgets For Winter Fun: From Snowball Guns to Ice Saunas: These gadgets help you make the most of the wintery weather.

Only five months since Apple launched the App Store, and there are now over ten thousand apps. Don’t worry, we did the hard part, trying them out and picking the year’s best:

We already selected our 20 essential iPhone apps not too long ago—November 14, to be exact. That’s recent enough to still be fresh, but to those 20, we’re adding 10 more, several of which have debuted between then and now. As a package, they’re 30 apps every iPhone owner should take a close look at. They’re what we use every day, and many of them are free.

The complete selection of our previous 20 essentials plus the 10 new apps can be viewed in our special Bestmodo Phone App directory. If you’d like, you can peruse all of our first 20 here on one page, and also, see the new additions to the list separately here:

EasyWriter: It seems simple—you can type URLs in landscape mode with its larger, more luxuriously spaced keyboard. Why not emails? EasyWriter solved it. Free; $2.99 for Pro edition

Facebook: For Facebookers (um, everyone, right?) it’s essential—a beautifully designed, uber-functional implementation that’s always with you. Free

EverNote: Already a popular web service and found on other devices, Evernote does something that every location-aware cameraphone should be able to do: quickly take and store geotagged photos so you can remember stuff. Free

Google Mobile: Google Mobile was a solid app (but not particularly essential)—and then came voice search. Free

RjDj: A totally unique music application that processes sound from your environment and replays it according to a set program, creating a trippy, always-evolving soundscape. Free to try; $2.99 expanded version

VLC Remote: One of the first apps we loved was the iTunes Remote—now, the Swiss army knife of media players VLC has one of its very own. Free ad-supported simple version; $1.99 for more controls and no ads

Wikipedia Mobile: Finally, the definitive Wikipedia reader for the iPhone. $2.99

Night Camera: Thanks to its accelerometer, your iPhone knows when it’s being jiggled. Night Camera, simply and ingeniously, uses this data to make your low-light picture clearer. $0.99

Tweetie: Twitter apps: there are a lot of ’em. Tweetie, though, is the closest you’ll get to the Twitter desktop experience, and therefore our best of. $2.99

Recorder: While not the sexiest apps, a good solid voice recorder can be incredibly handy—especially if you are a handsome FBI investigator in the town of Twin Peaks. $0.99

Be sure to check out our 10 best iPhone games of 2008—if you haven’t already.

There’s no doubt about it—working sucks. I can only hope that my weekly gadget lists helped you avoid doing your job for a few minutes at least. Here are ten of the best installments.

•10 R/C Toys That Are Extraordinary (Or Just Plain Weird): This list has all things R/C…and I do mean all things (R/C Penises and Zombies anyone?).

•10 Ultimate Ghetto Gadget Creations: These gadgets may not be pretty—but they work.

•10 Record Breaking Consumer Gadgets: The fastest car, biggest plasma television, most powerful flashlight and highest popping toaster are all right here.

•10 Insane Bikes That No One Should Ever Ride: Designers with a deathwish push bicycles beyond all bounds of practicality and logic.

•Top 10 Desks For Gadget Lovers: Serious desks for serious professionals. If you love gadgets, these are the desks you should have in your office.

•10 Gadgets That Have No Business Using a Jet Engine: People will put a jet engine on anything.

•10 Hypnotic Gadgets You Just Can’t Stop Looking At: These design and repetitive movement of these 10 gadgets are truly mesmerizing.

•10 Segway Killers That Don’t Make You Look Like a Complete Tool: These vehicles only make you look tool-ish.

•10 Gadgets With Mind Boggling Moving Parts: These gadgets are so complex it will blow your mind.

•8 High Tech Christmas Trees: In honor of the holiday, I give you the 8 nerdiest trees on the planet.

It’s Christmas, and we’re betting that at least some of you received new digital cameras (be they point-and-shoots or DSLRs). And if you’re a photography n00b, we’ve got a few tips to help.

Turn On Burst Mode
It’s harder to capture candid shots on point-and-shoots (let’s call em PASs) than DSLRs, but in either format you should turn on “burst mode” or “continuous shooting.” This allows you to keep the camera taking shots as fast as it can by holding down the shutter button. Even the greatest photographers don’t predict magical moments down to the millisecond—they let their camera do it for them. And with today’s cheap and gigantic SD cards, you can afford to waste plenty of shots to get the best.

Control the Color Temperature Yourself
Auto White Balance (AWB) does a good job on most cameras. But you know who can do a better job? You. Backing up for a moment, since every color has its own relative “temperature” that’s measured in degrees Kelvin, even the orangey glow of an incandescent bulb or the relatively bluish hue of the sun’s light can screw with your photos. Your brain factors it out when you’re looking around, but it’s important to notice whether the light falling on your scene is more yellow or blue, and to compensate.
Your camera uses auto white balance to get around this cacophony of color, but it’s not always right. On some cameras, you can actually use “manual white balance” (MWB), shooting a white patch, such as a piece of paper, in order to say “THIS IS WHITE.” That’s the most accurate way, though the simpler way found on most cameras is to manually select the best white balance by choosing the tiny icon that identifies your light source: a sun for direct sunlight, a cloud for cloudy, a round bulb for incandescent, a rectangular bulb for fluorescent, etc.

Keep ISO to 400 on PASs, 800-1600 on Low-End dSLRs
ISO, a carryover term from the days of film, essentially signals the sensitivity of the imaging sensor to light. A higher number means grainier (noisier) but better defined shots in low light; a lower number means smoother shots in decent light. Most cameras will crank this number in medium to low light situations so that it can capture a shot without blurring, but you will get a grainy image. This may just be a rule of thumb based on the cameras I’ve used, but for optimally crisp shots, don’t let the ISO exceed 400 on your PAS or 1600 on your DSLR. (In some older DSLR models, you probably shouldn’t exceed 800.)
Use Diffuse Flash, Or Just Turn it Off
Any way you cut it, flash is a problem. When used instead of ambient light, it pulls the color and texture from skin, turns eyes red (a phenomenon caused when the flash is too close to your lens, which it is in most cameras) and often erases the background ambiance from your shot. A few things you can do will help tame flash:
1. Check your manual for minimum and maximum flash distances—probably around 6 to 12 feet away—and stay in those constraints.
2. Diffuse the flash. A classic trick for DSLR owners is to put a cigarette carton on large flash attachments, but in the absence of a large flash—and a cigarette carton—try taping some kind of translucent paper over your flash.
3. Turn it off. Even a grainier high-ISO shot is better than a washed-out flash explosion. If you use a tripod, you can get nice low light shots without resorting to flash or upping the ISO. Most cameras now have a flashless “night mode” to automate this process.

Carry a Pocket Tripod
Ultimately, if you want to take good shots in dark environments, you need to allow light to hit your camera’s imaging sensor for a longer period of time. And the only way to keep your shots sharp in this scenarios is to stabilize your camera. Though even cheap cameras boast image stabilizers of all kinds, a $7 pocket tripod trumps all that marketing speak, allowing you to use a solid surface to set up the camera and then angle it to your liking. If you don’t have a tripod, try resting your camera on the side of a table, or up on a (preferably empty) water glass.

Protect Your Images From Lens Flare
In any situation where sunlight or some other bright light source is hitting your lens indirectly (not associated with your subject), you may lose part of your image to stray light. Sometimes this looks cool, of course, but not always. The best and most common solution is a lens hood. The second best solution (and the one that works for PASs) is your hand, a piece of paper, anything, between that light source and your lens.

Exhale, Then Shoot
ISOs and tripods aside, maybe the best tip I’ve ever gotten to taking great shots was to exhale, then take the picture. Right after you exhale, the tension is released from your body, and you’ll find yourself, for a brief moment, at your stillest and most relaxed. In low light especially, it could be the difference between getting a clear shot and getting a blurry one.

Use Sepia Filter Whenever Humanly Possible
Sepia is well known for making your lousy photography “deep.” Helllllooo precious moments! (OK, I sort of despise sepia because it’s been so overused, but that’s just me. It can be beautiful, of course.)
For DSLR Owners…Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW, Shoot in RAW
There are many advantages to the average DSLR camera, but the best, by far, unequivocally, is RAW shooting. If you save your pictures as JPEGs, they can be beautiful, but they’ve been compressed and packaged into a product. If you save in RAW, you have a picture, but you also have the cold clay that shaped it.
RAW is the data pulled right off the imaging sensor of your camera, before it gets run through a bunch of optimizer and compression algorithms. This data allows for a complete do-over on many aspects of the picture, like color temperature. In other cases, it allows a lot of room for fudging, as with exposure. You’ll need software that can handle RAW images—most cameras come with something proprietary, but Photoshop can also manage RAW from the major camera brands. Just don’t be scared by it. It’s why you’re holding that shiny new DSLR you have no idea how to use.

And Your Own…
I realize this list will seem too obvious to some, but the goal is to help those who didn’t know much to start with. Since we have more than our share of incredible photographers among our readership, I’d encourage any of you with pro tips to please offer them up in comments.

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