Seven Must-Have Gadget Gifts

Best Portable Sound

I am not even going to burden these bits and bytes with mentioning Microsoft's ludicrous Zune portable player, which is attempting to compete this year with Apple's (AAPL) iPod. Microsoft has no chance with the Zune. Not one.

Of much more interest in smaller sound systems are advances in headphones and headphone amps. Companies like Sennheiser and Beyerdynamics have, until now, ruled the high-end headphone roost.

But this year a new player fought its way to the top of the headphone heap: the AKG 701. A reasonable $449 buys you a phenomenal headphone. The AKG is so good, you'll need a separate headphone amplifier to get the most out of these cans. My pick? The Headroom Max Balanced Amp ($3,999). Run the 701 through the Headroom and you'll taste true elite-level audio, which is as pure an experience as you can have with personal technology.

Best Navigation

You know the world is in turmoil when navigation is a big story.

This year saw a bumper crop of technologies that help us get around: Cell-phone companies like Verizon (VZ), Sprint Nextel (S) and Cingular all are selling decent navigation products. And in-car vendors like Pioneer, Alpine and Clarion, too, are pushing navigation units.

But my pick for best nav tool is the portable Garmin Nuvi 360 ($857).

The 360 is an elegant little navigational butler, the size of a pack of cigarettes, which resides quietly in your pocket and feeds flawless instructions on how to get from here to there.

This map-rich mini-me knows most of North America's streets, restaurants and points of interest. It can drive with you, bike with you and store pictures and music. And it even translates from one language to another.

With the Nuvi, now only losers get lost.

Best Transportation

If mortally ridiculous transportation such as the Segway scooter and SpaceShipOne rocketship can count as a tech story in 2006 (and what self-respecting person of means gets anywhere near either of these stupid-looking things?), I can aptly make a transportation pick in a tech roundup.

	The Lotus Elise

This was a banner year for getting around in technostyle. We saw excellent developments in A-Class catamarans from makers like Boyer and old-school steel-frame bikes from builders like Vanilla Bicycles, but my pick for high tech transportation is easy: the Lotus Elise ($42,900).

The Elise is the gadget of autos: No back seat. No trunk space to speak of. No ground clearance. Not even power windows. But for the joy of traveling in high-tech style, the Elise is impossible to beat.

Everything a rich geek dreams of is here: epoxy-glued aluminum chassis, roto-molded fiberglass body, a tiny little sound system and the roar of an 1.8-liter engine right behind your head.

Fun on this level usually costs several hundred thousand dollars from an elite maker like Maserati or Ferrari. But the Lotus costs less than $40,000 to start, and it even gets 30 miles to a gallon of gasoline.

Fun and functional: that's great technology.

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