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Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > December > 17 > Entry

Gift Guide Bonus Gifts 5: Cool speakers, pen computer

By Omar Gallaga | Monday, December 17, 2007, 04:49 PM

I know we like to pretend we’re all above the holiday shopping pressure. It’s not about the gifts, we tell ourselves, as we scramble to get to the mall for a few more precious hours to finish off with our Christmas shopping list

In any case, here are a few more ideas for gifts, items that didn’t quite make our previous gift guides:

JBL has two very attractive sets of speakers. It’s very hard to buy a horrible sounding set of speakers these days (unless you spend under $100 or go for something wireless). With the assurance that a decent set of speakers will sound pretty good as long as you’re not trying to amplify sound in a stadium, you can afford to look for something stylish. Most speakers are ugly. These are not.

The $130 JBL Spot sound system is a simple set of speakers that are appropriate to hook up to a computer or an iPod in an office or dorm room. The speakers look like little shiny pods and have removable covers in different colors. You’re not going to get Dolby Digital surround sound out of these (it’s a “2.1-channel” system), but you will get pretty speakers that probably sound pretty good.

For something more robust, you could spring for JBL’s Cinema Sound CS480 Home Theater Speaker System. For $800, you get a stylish set of five speakers and a subwoofer for home theater sound.

For serious home theater enthusiasts, 7.1-channel sound is where it’s at these days (seven speakers plus a subwoofer), but if you care more about nice-looking speakers that look good with your new HDTV than the latest in hi-fi sound, this set might be good enough.

And last, there’s the Fly Fusion Pentop Computer, a $80 USB pen that can record handwritten notes to a computer and translate them to word processing or e-mail documents. There are homework helper modules available for the Pentop to assist with writing, algebra, Spanish and other subjects. It sounds great in theory, but I’m not sure it would have been too useful for me in school: my handwriting is so bad I can barely read it myself sometimes.