Stuff Geeks Want

The 2010 Aston Martin DBS Volante continues to leave James Bond proud although a little wind blown. Yes, the DBS coupe has gone rag top, opening and closing we’re told in as little as 14 seconds.

A hand-built, 517 horsepower, six-litre, V12 engine powers you to 60 in 4.3 seconds, and then on to 191 mph. The automatic six-speed Touchtronic gearbox purrs you through the gears – either a six-speed manual transmission or an optional ZF-sourced six-speed automatic.

Not to skimp on amenities, it includes a Bang & Olufsen surround sound system, iPod connector, and sumptuous leather trim as standard equipment.

Starting at $282,500 for the manual and $286,500 for the automatic, it’s simply narvana on wheels.

To listen to Internet radio, Napster, MP3s and more, you need a bunch of equipment, right? Wrong. Wi-Fi music systems are picking up steam in time for the holidays and they’re now packing a lot of features and simplicity into small boxes.

Take for instance the Logitech Squeezebox Boom. It’s not the most elegant looking Wi-Fi radio, but specs-wise it’s a beaut.

As long as you’ve got a net-connected router or a WiFi connection, you’re ready to listen to tons of radio stations, internet-only stations, Last.fm, Napster and MP3 tunes. It packs 30 watts of sound from two 3/4-inch tweeters and two 3-inch woofers, as a auxiliary-in and headphone-in jacks, six memory presets, an optional subwoofer output, and remote.

As for sound, it’s much weightier and punchier than you’d think. It’s got XL Technology that allows its smaller speakers to achieve great results. It nicely fills even large rooms with decent sound…loud and clear, rich in low and mid frequencies with tweeters can handle the watts.

Buy for $272 from Amazon

Like sticking a pencil in your eye, nothing is more excruciating than having to watch other people’s holiday photos. But if you’re forced into doing it, it might as well be fun and easy. That’s where the Nikon S1000pj comes in. It’s the first compact camera to come with a built-in pico projector.

Hit the button and it’ll beam the pics and hi-definition video held within onto a wall at a size as small as five inches and as large as 40 inches, and it will project from about six feet away with 10 lumens brightness. Nikon says the camera’s projector will work for an hour before its battery runs out. I can think of hundreds of situations where something like this could come in real handy like a bar where there’s a bunch of people and you’ve got a blank wall or on the back of an airplane seat to show a small crowd.

As for its basic digital camera capabilities, it can capture photos with over 12-megapixel resolution, it’s got a 5x wide-angle zoom lens, a 2.7-inch LCD screen, accepts SecureDigital (SD) memory cards, has built-in automatic scene-detecting capability, and it lets you edit images directly on the camera like brightening an image or rotating a photo.

You’re going to see a lot more of these type of cameras with built-in projection in 2010. For now, it’s the first.

Buy for $429 from Amazon

It’s been hailed as the top of the line golfing rangefinder that can actually and dramatically help shave points of your golf game. The Leica Pinmaster uses a laser to calculate distances on the golf course up to 820 yards.

While some might think such a device would slow down and hinder your game, it really doesn’t. You don’t stand on the course fumbling to get it to work. See the pin or other target (such as the front of the green), lock on, hit a button and you’ve got the distance through the viewfinder – often more accurate than the posted numbers on the course. You can also hold the button down and scan around to get distances of bunkers and anything you point it at instantly.

It offers a 7x magnification and a large field of view of 347 feet at a distance of 1,000 yards. The eye-piece features a dioptre adjustment, which enables the user to select the best setting for their eyesight, and is suitable for people who wear glasses. The LED display also automatically adjusts its brightness to suit the ambient lighting conditions of the day.

This is a dream product that does what it promises. Slightly expensive, it’s for the real addicted golfer.

Buy for $599 from Amazon

We get a lot of press releases here at StuffGeeksWant. So many of them are written like a product brochure and it’s our tough job to break them down into easy-to-understand language for you, our loyal readers. Case in point…the much talked about Tech 21 iBand iPhone case.

It’s made with d30, “a specially engineered material made with intelligent molecules.” (Translation…it’s spongy silicon rubber that becomes strong as steel when it’s impacted.) “They flow with the product but upon shock, lock together to absorb the impact energy.” (Translation…your iPhone ‘takes a licking and keeps on ringing’.)

It fits only the iPhone 3G and 3GS models, but we can attest to the unique toughness of this case. It wraps around the edges of the iPhone, and doesn’t cover the back or front, so it won’t protect from scratches. Its raised edges might help by elevating the phone off surfaces slightly.

It’s got a “unique slimline design that complements your iPhone 3G.” (Translation: It looks good to the Ladies.)

Well worth the investment compared to many so-called ‘tough iPhone cases’.

Buy for $29 from Amazon

The bad thing about frying the Thanksgiving turkey is that you have to stand outdoors in the cold to do it and the flammable oil displaced by a 15-pound turkey can easily overflow onto a propane-fueled flame. Not a pretty holiday sight.

But Masterbuilt has created the first indoor turkey fryer you plug into the wall. The Butterball Indoor Electric Turkey Fryer was designed to meet Underwriters Labs standards for safety. Its features include a thermostat temperature control sensor that prevents overheating and a digital timer that helps cook the turkey just right.

That leaves plenty of time to nap and watch football Thanksgiving day.

Buy for $140 from Amazon

Maybe Apple should have gotten Valerie Bertinelli to do its TV commercials for the entry level MacBook upgrade: lighter, thinner and one complete package. I don’t know which one I want more.

At $999, Apple has managed to shave its weight (5 pounds down to 4.7 pounds) and thickness by using similar construction techniques used in its aluminum MacBook Pro line that make the low-end laptop a one piece, white, unibody polycarbonate shell.

Specs: 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, an 8x double-layer SuperDrive, an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chip, and a seven-hour battery life (debatable).

New: a switch to an LED-backlit display and the same glass multi-touch trackpad found in the MacBook Pro line. Sad: the disappearance (again) of a FireWire 400 port and a switch to Apple’s oh so popular self-contained, non-swappable battery (not!).

Think of this new model as simply growing up with the times, but costing the same.

Buy for $994 from Amazon

86,400 seconds. 1,440 minutes. 24 hours. A full day. That’s how long you can shoot high-definition video with the Canon Vixia HF S11 digital camcorder before having to unload footage from its 64 gigabyte, built-in flash memory.

Under most circumstances, you’ll probably not worry about running out of recording room on this HD handheld. You’ll also be able to record full HD video in your choice of a 24p Cinema or 30p Progressive modes.

Other nice features: captures 8-megapixel still images, has face detection, re-charges its battery in about 10 minutes per half hour of battery life, a quick and accurate focusing system, and an optical stabilizer.

A reviewer for a video magazine I recently spoke with told me he was impressed with this HD camcorder. For him the video performance and quality were top-notch at both its maximum 24-megabit-per-second bit rate and 17Mbps.

Buy for $1367 from Amazon

Mouse buttons are passé, or so says our friends at Apple. The Apple Magic Mouse replaces the Mighty Mouse, has no buttons and sports a “seamless multi-touch surface.”

According to Apple, that multitouch surface covers the entire device, enabling users to scroll in any direction or swipe through Web pages just by moving their fingers across the top.

Apple says the Magic Mouse “won’t confuse a scroll with a swipe,” because of its embedded ‘magical brain’. In short, Apple’s trying to mirror the multitouch functionality of its laptop trackpad in a mouse.

It’s Bluetooth only, so if you want a wired mouse, Apple has rebranded the Mighty Mouse as the ‘Apple Mouse’. How convenient.

Buy for $69 from Amazon

How many holidays pics do you have that you’ve commented “I’m not in this one because I was taking the photo”? Not any more with the IPT-DS1 Party-shot Automatic Photographer from Sony. It’s a newfangled camera dock that takes photos for you.

It pans 360 degrees and tilts 24 degrees, automatically detects faces and adjusts composition. Compatible with the DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1 Cyber-shot digital cameras only, the Party-shot is mountable on nearly any tripod, so you can set it up in a convenient location in your home, especially when you are entertaining. With two AA batteries, it captures photos for up to 11 hours and is portable, so you can enjoy taking pictures outdoors.

Buy the Sony IPT-DS1 Party-shot for $150 from Amazon

Buy the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 for $306 from Amazon

Buy the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX1 for $327 from Amazon