You
already know that high-tech products dominate holiday gift-giving. This
year, the world’s stockings will be stuffed with an awful lot of the
obvious ones: Amazon Echos, Chromecast Audios, Surface Pros, iPads, and
so on.
But
there’s more to life than the big names. Every year, the market
overflows with new and obscure products, all scheduled to come out just
in time for the holidays. And in there, buried among the boring and the
doomed, are some genuinely great ideas for holiday gift-giving.
And
so, as a service to you, the busy person with better things to do, I’ve
winnowed down all those products to just seven, ranging in price from
$2 to $300, that are beautifully done, non-obvious, and sure to please
the lucky recipients.
Ready? Let the grab bag opening begin!
Magnetic Notes
These
crazy, self-sticking pages look exactly like Post-it notes, but there’s
a big difference: They don’t use adhesive. Instead, they adhere with
static cling.
To anything: glass,
stone, plastic, wood, metal — anything. And since there’s no gumminess,
you can pull them off and stick them back on over and over again.
(They came about from a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign.)
They come in a crazy number of sizes, styles, and colors — including transparent, which
is something you won’t find in regular Post-it notes. They also come in
large, very large, and super-large sizes — so big, they’re like
portable wipe-off boards that you can stick anywhere.
(The
pages stick equally well front or back. The front has the color; the
back is shiny white plastic, which you can use as a “white board” with
wipe-off marker.)
Everyone
who sees these things thinks of another idea for them. “Put the big
ones on the walls and let the kids draw on them!” “Put one inside your
windshield to leave a note!” “They’d be great for family Dictionary!”
Staples will carry them eventually; for now, you can order them from the company’s site.
Yoshirt
Send these guys a photo (using the Yoshirt app, if you like), and they send you back the coolest T-shirt ($40). It features your photo or design, covering the fabric completely, front and back.
This
is no iron-on. They actually print the color of your design directly
onto the sections of the garment and then sew them together into a
shirt.
I sent them this picture of my cat Wilbur (left), and this is what they sent me back:
I’ve had four people ask where they can get my cool cat T-shirt. Guess what? They can’t. I have the only one!
A
Yoshirt makes a spectacular gift, one that won’t wind up forgotten in
some gadget drawer. Just be aware that these shirts are made by hand —
so if you want your shirt for sure delivered in time for Christmas, place your order in the next couple of days.
SleepPhones
Plenty of people like to fall asleep to music, podcasts, or audio books — or would like to, anyway. But how are you going to do that? Not with hard plastic earbuds, that’s for sure — they’d kill your
ears after a while (if you don’t get strangled by the cord first). Not
with traditional headphones, either; they’ll come off if you turn onto
your side.
Here’s the ingenious solution: SleepPhones.
It’s an incredibly soft, fleece headband that contains soft, flexible,
flat speakers aligned with your ears and a soft, flat, rubber control
panel in the front. Whoever’s next to you in bed won’t be disturbed by
your own private audioscape.
There’s
a $30 model with a cord that plugs into your phone or whatever audio
source you have. But the real magic is the wireless Bluetooth model ($90
on Amazon). It lets you drift off to music with your head in any
position on the pillow, without feeling any lumps or getting tangled in
any cords.
You
have to recharge the little control pod daily, and getting it in and
out of the headband can be a struggle. But at least you can take the
speakers and control pod out when you want to wash the headband.
Zolt charger
It’s the smallest, lightest laptop charger in the world, according to the company.
Well, I can tell you for sure that it’s much smaller and lighter than my MacBook Air’s traditional charger, which I no longer carry.
Despite
consuming so much less space and weight in my bag, the Zolt charger (a)
has two additional USB jacks for charging phones and things
simultaneously, (b) has only two prongs, not three, so it fits into more
outlets, and © has rotating prongs, so you can make your charging
cables sprout in the right direction from a crowded power strip.
It comes with tips for every conceivable brand of Windows laptop, and for $20, you can get a MagSafe 2 cable for Mac laptops. (The Zolt Website
is wrong when it says the charger isn’t compatible with larger Mac
laptops, like the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It is — it just doesn’t charge
them as fast as the Apple charger.)
Withings Activité watch
Fitness
bands are great and all. But in general, they’re ugly, especially
compared with the other kind of gadgets we’ve been wearing on our wrists
for hundreds of years: watches.
This year, it occurred to a few companies that they could put fitness-tracking guts into actual wristwatches. D’OH!
This one is fantastic. It’s the Withings Activité, with a special dial dedicated to showing how close you’ve come to your daily step count.
It
also tracks your sleep pretty well (and can wake you with a silent
vibrating alarm). All of this health data shows up on your phone in
handsome, well-organized graphs.
The best parts: The watch is truly waterproof. You can shower with it, no problem — in fact, it’s a great swimming tracker. And the button battery lasts eight months. Let’s see you do that, Fitbit!
What’s
crazy is that you can make the hands of the watch spin around fast —
when the time zone changes, for example, or when you double-tap the
watch to check the alarm time. The hands fly around, pause at the alarm
time to show you, and then fly back into place at the current time. So
cool.
The
watch models range from the Activité Pop ($100 on Amazon, choice of
colors) to the Activité Steel shown in the video above ($170) to the
Activité (Swiss-made, calf-leather band, $450). I miss having a
heart-rate monitor, but waterproofness and an eight-month battery are
pretty sweet consolations.
Blaze Laserlight bike light
Here’s another Kickstarter success story: A great-looking, waterproof, rechargeable, 13-hour, aluminum-clad bike light.
I
thought $200 was a lot for a bike light, but every biker I know who saw
this thing went nuts.
They loved both the very bright, 300-lumen LED
light (choice of brightness; blinking or continuous) — and, in
particular, the picture of a bicycle projected 15 feet ahead of
you by a green laser. The idea is to let cars and people know that
you’re coming while there’s still time to react.
(The company says that
79 percent of biking accidents happen when cars maneuver into a bike’s
path.)
The
light itself pops off of the handlebar bracket with a quick trigger
pull so that thieves can’t make away with your $200 light. The laser
doesn’t operate when the light is off its bracket, for safety.
Here’s a surefire way to make a beloved bike rider in your life very, very happy.
Bose QuietComfort 25
Bose
dominates the noise-canceling headphones market for one simple reason:
Nobody else has managed to duplicate the effectiveness of its noise
cancellation. I’ve tested several dozen pairs (looking truly absurd on
long flights during testing), and Bose’s are simply the quietest.
But Bose knows that it’s the 800-pound gorilla. That’s why it can get away with charging $300 for these babies.
Anyway, the QuietComfort 25
headphones are new, and they’re a big step forward. They sound better
than their predecessors. They don’t give some people the uncomfortable
sensation of — what’s the word? — ear vacuum, as the QC 15s did.
And unlike previous Bose models, these work as headphones for music even when they’re not turned on or the battery’s dead.
Finally, the 25s fold up smaller into a more compact case.
Truly,
if you spend much time on planes or trains, or your loved one does,
you’ll have a hard time finding a better designed noise-canceling
headphone.
Holly happidays
There
you have it — seven ideas you probably didn’t think of yourself. May
your days be merry, your family gatherings harmonious, and your battery
life exceptional.
