My favorite tech gadget of the year

I get to test a lot of gizmos and gadgets each year and at the end of every year I pick the one i have personally found the most unique or fulfilling or just plain fun.

Up until November, my choice would have been the iPhone.

But then I came across the Cuddeback. What’s that, you ask? The gadget I’ve enjoyed the most each year.
Click the video arrow to see why:

It’s fun looking at the pictures, of course. But there’s also a market for them. Here’s info about a guide that tells you how to make money selling your digital pictures.

And if you’re really interested in improving your figital photography skills, this is one of the best books I’ve come across.

Norad Santa Tracker

There’s a new tradition for many each Christmas Eve in this information age: gathering ‘round the computer to track Santa’s delivery progress on the Internet. This year, Google is helping the NORAD folks with some free software.

Technology has made Santa tracking an online art form this year, as Google gets onboard, helping the people at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) make the mapping even more precise.

Here’s a video preview:

The NORAD site goes live with tracking Christmas Eve but you can monitor the activity at the North Pole as Santa and his helpers get ready for the big night. There’s an interactive tour you can take, checking out the workshop and all the preparations.

Then, Google has some free Internet tools you’ll want to download ahead of time, like the Google Earth application, which, combined with its mapping and satellite imaging, will let you virtually zoom in on your house with a Santa-eye view that takes you right to the chimney.

mStation tower amp for the iPod

Sooner or later, every iPod owner wants to play his iPod through speakers. Today, I’ve got the mother of all iPod speaker systems to show you… a room filling tower that fills up a corner of a room all by itself.

At nearly four feet tall, the mStation Tower costs $299, less of you shop around online, and works with any dockable iPod… from the little nano to the Classic.

Made from extruded aluminum and made to stand on the floor, it delivers 100 watts of 2.1 stereo. The bass is pulse pounding, this black central cylinder is the subwoofer… there are additional speakers in these aluminum side speakers. You can use the controls on the top here to play or, better yet, this credit-card remote,

This is my favorite iPod accessory of the year. We’ve had a couple Christmas parties and this has belted out my Manheim Steamroller with gusto. It’s available online and at big box stores like WalMart.

Amazon Kindle is season’s hot seller

This just may be the season’s hotest new gizmo - the Amazon Kindle - a paperback-sized e-book reader. While such gadgets have been around for a few years, this one has some new high tech improvements that Amazon hopes will do for digital books what the iPod did for digital music.

With a memory expansion card, you can hold thousands, plus hundreds of newspapers, magazines and even blogs.

Here’s the first neat thing about the Kindle -the readability of the screen. It uses something called e-ink. There’s no glare, even in daylight. It’s as close to reading ink on paper as you can get on a screen.
But what really makes the Kindle stand out is its wireless, high speed access to the Internet… from anywhere…at no additional cost.

It connects to a special Kindle area on the Amazon website where - for less than $10 - you can download any one of the tens of thousands of books available. It takes just a few seconds and - zap - the book is in your Kindle. You can have newspapers similarly delivered.

Reading on a Kindle is really pleasant. You change pages by pressing these buttons. You can also access a Web browser, search a free dictionary and free encyclopedia…bookmark pages, even type out notes or send your own documents to the Kindle.

It takes about an hour to get used to using it…after that, it’s just like reading a regular book. And the battery really lasts. I’m about all the way through one novel and have been using this heavily for five days now and still don’t need to recharge.

My one big criticism is the cost– $399. But it must it not bother too many people because it’s sold out several times since it was introduced a few weeks ago. If you’re a book lover… you’ll love the Kindle.