Gillian Shaw
Sun
. Bang & Olufsen Beo5 remote control, $660 Cdn
If you’ve read this far after seeing the price tag on Bang & Olufsen’s futuristic remote control, you’re definitely among the home entertainment aficionados who are always on the search for the single perfect remote control. An elegant answer to that confusing array of remotes, the Beo5 boasts that the 15 years of research and development behind it will let it operate any product combination, even products with features and functions that haven’t been thought of yet. That’s a tall order, and one that is delivered in a device with a colour LCD display with a programmable touch-sensitive screen.
2. Barbie Girl MP3, $70 Cdn
A new way to play with Barbies, this fashion doll plays MP3 music and doubles as a “key” to unlock play features on the not-surprisingly saccharine BarbieGirls.com virtual world. Unlock the beauty club, adopt a pet — it’s all in an online community for girls at BarbieGirls.com with a Canadian beta version at www.barbiegirls.ca. The 11-cm dolls have only 512 MB of internal memory, but they have a mini secure digital memory card slot to expand that song storage by another two gigabytes. Targeted at girls up to age nine, this could be one of those Christmas list panic items for parents, with four million users already registered on the BarbieGirls website — and that number grows by 45,000 a day.
3. RoboQuad, $100 US
Not just your ordinary robot, this arthropod being released this fall comes courtesy of Wowwee, a Hong Kong-based entertainment robotics company that encourages its customers to hack their gadgets. Its robots come with colour-coded wires and plastic bodies that can be removed without damaging them, making them an irresistible challenge for buyers. The animated robot RoboQuad interacts with his environment, is programmable with up to 40 moves, and comes with three personality settings. One RoboQuad owner posted a hack that transformed the robot into a Robospy, using Skype to call up the robot which had been outfitted with a head-mounted video camera to stream live video back.
4. XLink, $160 Cdn
Aimed at the growing number of phone users who want their cellphone to double as a home phone, the XLink can simultaneously connect three different Bluetooth-enabled cellphones to standard home telephones. When one of the cellphones rings, the regular landline phones ring as well. It lets you hold onto those familiar home phones that may have special features or headsets while losing your conventional land line.
