© Western Digital

If you’ve been reading my shopping blogs like you should have been, you’ll know all about external hard disk drives like the Western Digital My Book Pro. Why they give them daft names like that is anybody’s guess, but don’t let that put you off. An external hard disk drive is an essential gadget for any PC or laptop owner- or better still, a couple of them.

Look at the pros if you still need convincing:

1. They’re cheap. You can get 640Gigs of high speed storage with Western Digital’s Elements drive (another daft name I’m afraid) for under £60, or a whole terabyte for around £100. Just imagine how impressed your mates will be to hear about your terabyte. My wife thought it was a thing like a tortoise when she heard about it.
2. They’re incredibly easy to use. No opening your PC. Just plug your hard drive into the mains, plug it into a USB slot, and you’re up and running.
3. They work on PC or laptop. Same thing applies - plug into mains, plug into USB and you’re set.
4. Portability comes as standard. External hard drives are so compact you can take them anywhere. Got lots of videos and stuff on your PC you want to show your mates? Copy it all to your external HDD, carry the disk round to their house, plug it into their PC and away you go.
5. They’re secure. You can keep your most prized stuff on an external hard disk drive and store the HDD well away from your PC. So if you’re burgled or burnt down, you don’t lose your data with your PC.
6. You can have two, three, or as many as you’ve got USB ports for. And if you’ve run out of USB ports, see my shopping blog on USB hubs and go shopping for one of those.

I’d give you a list of the cons too, but there aren’t any.

Rob

Rated: from 1751 votes

© HP

An all in one printer - that is an inkjet printer which doubles as a scanner and copier - sounds like just the thing for the home PC user. Why buy three gadgets when one will do the job? And even budget models like the HP Photosmart 2575 perform brilliantly at all three jobs and get great product reviews.

So what things do you bear in mind before going shopping for your all in one printer?

Well the first thing to ask is do you really need to scan and copy? I know that I never scan or copy documents these days - anything I need to reproduce gets snapped by my digital camera and quickly uploaded to my PC. The quality is great, I can choose to photograph a whole document or take close ups of bits of it, and print it all out to my heart’s content on my normal HP inkjet printer.

The second thing is could you manage without it? And by that I mean if the scanner part broke and you had to send the machine away to be mended, you’d be without a printer too. Or if you decided to replace it instead of having it repaired you’d be throwing away a perfectly good printer just to get a new scanner.

And thirdly, how much printing would you be doing? With printer prices at rock bottom levels, the manufacturers are having to make their profits on inkjet cartridges. For a £60 all in one printer, you could easily be paying £20 or more each time the ink runs out. Ink is by far the most expensive factor in owning a printer, and you need to do your sums and use the cost per print figures from the product reviews to see how much owning your printer will really cost you.

If you do a lot of mono printing, then you’d be advised to look at a budget laser printer instead and deal with your scanning and copying another way. Coming in at £150, a budget laser printer could be just the thing you need!

Rob

Rated: from 1872 votes

© HP

I don’t know anybody without a PDA, though the definition of what’s a Personal Digital Assistant and what’s a mobile phone has long since blurred away. I must admit I’m not a big fan of the Nokia E71 or Blackberrys where they fit full keyboards, scrollwheels and the like inside gadgets which are far too small to use them comfortably.

And the big problem with PDAs is always how to match small size with huge functionality. Everybody wants to have the smallest gadgets and everybody wants to have gadgets with the most facilities - even though half of the facilities never get used anyway. But that’s another story.

To be any use at all, PDAs have got to sync with your schedules and lists held on PC and the simplest way to do this is via a PDA cable.

You may even wish to have a spare PDA cable at work as well so you don’t have to remember to bring the one from home.

However, Bluetooth wireless communication is now pretty universal for PDAs, and all you need is a Bluetooth dongle to plug into the USB port of your PC and you can connect wirelessly. It’s not quite as fast as using a PDA cable, but unless you’re transferring vast amounts of information, speed shouldn’t be a problem. But please don’t ask me why they named a wireless protocol after a mediaeval King of Denmark.

And recently, some PDA/phones such as the Samsung i900 have started coming equipped with full Wifi capability, allowing much faster transfer of data. Now that many PDAs can store and play long videos, your shopping blog can see this as the trend, and expects that Bluetooth with its much slower speed will slowly fade away.

Though speaking for myself, I do prefer using a cable.

Rob

Rated: from 1408 votes

© AEG

At this time of year, it’s easy to forget about your fridge freezer, what with the cold weather outside. But Christmas, with the non stop eating and entertaining is just the time when you need your fridge freezer to be at its best. You wouldn’t have much of a festive season without it, that’s for sure.

So now is the time to get out that fridge thermometer and just check that both your fridge and your freezer are keeping stuff as cold as they should. The fridge must be between +1 and +3 degrees C and your freezer no warmer than -15 degrees C to keep your food in safety.

Your white goods will get less efficient with age and it’s as well to find out now that they need replacing rather than on Christmas morning when the turkey and trifle have gone off after the fridge failed during the night!

If your fridge freezer is up to the job, well congratulations: have a good Christmas. But if not, then check out what AEG Electrolux have on offer and get one delivered in plenty of time to fill it with festive cheer. AEG Electrolux is one of the best value and most reliable manufacturers of fridge freezers and other white goods, and AEG Electrolux is always the first choice of this shopping blog writer when I need to replace any of my kitchen appliances.

Kitchen appliances may not come as high up your Christmas present list as the latest electronic gadgets, but if your fridge freezer isn’t up to the job, shopping for a new one now will do far more for your Christmas enjoyment.

Rob

Rated: from 1831 votes

© Logitech

There are two types of people: those who use a headset on their PC and those who prefer a desktop microphone and speakers.

Here are five reasons why a quality headset might be just the thing for you.

1. A Logitech headset is so comfortable you forget you’re wearing it.

2. Your music or video listening and live messaging conversations are private - nobody else in the house gets disturbed.

3. You can sit in the position that suits you. No leaning forward to make yourself heard in the desktop mic.

4. Pound for pound, you get better sound out of headphones than out of cheap speakers. So if you’ve not got a set of giant speakers, complete with subwoofer, on your Christmas present list, look at the great Logitech headsets there are for well under £50.

5. A headset doesn’t take up valuable desk space. If your desk is as crowded with electronic gadgets, shopping magazines, product reviews and other essentials as mine is, you’ll be grateful for not having to clutter it up with a microphone.

Rob

Rated: from 2260 votes

© Dyson

One of the marvels of the 20^th century was the invention of the disposable bag for the vacuum cleaner. No mess, no fuss, just take out the old bag and pop in a new one. And then came the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner.

The cleaning power of the Dyson’s “cyclone” technology was certainly something special, and Dyson vacuum cleaners don’t lose any suction as they fill up. But suddenly we’re plunged back to the bad old days of holding your vacuum cleaner over the bin, shaking it violently to empty it and getting covered with a cloud of dust and fluff. I’m not at all convinced that it’s a step in the right direction.

I’ve looked at product reviews, and there’s no getting away from the fact that the bagless vacuum cleaners clean better than the others. Even the bagless models brought out by Electrolux and Hoover clean better than the old models. But none of the product reviews I’ve read seem as upset as I am at the return to the messy days of emptying the cleaner. You’d think somebody would have invented the bagless vacuum cleaner with a bag to avoid all that.

What do you think? Is the mess worth it for the extra cleaning power, or not? It’s your shopping blog and your shopping blog wants to know your view.

Rob

Rated: from 1815 votes

I promised you another dinosaur robot, and this is clearly the best toy ever made…….ever.

While pleo is loveable with his artificial intelligence and cheeky personality, he’s a bit small and, well, roboty. So move over pleo, I’m introducing Kota, a soft, triceratops robot, and he’s amazing

This thing is enormous. He’s a couple of feet tall and you can actually sit on him as he snuffles, roars, blinks and sneezes. Kota is like a Jim Henson puppet of a dinosaur, or like the dinos from ‘the land before time’. He’s got a special leaf that he chomps if you put it in his mouth, and stroke him under the chin and he’ll purr like a massive dinosaur cat.

He doesn’t actually walk about your room, but when you’re sitting on him he’s quite bouncy and you can bob up and down. If they made these when I was a kid, I would have pestered my mum for as long as it took to get me one. For years if necessary. This is the best toy of the year, of the decade, and possibly ever. Until they invent one that walks of course.

Bounce up and down and he’ll make stamping noises, or press music button so he dances to the jungle rhythm. As one for the boys, this toy will be at the top of every Christmas list. It’s a bit pricy at £300, but shop around and you can find offers for £250ish, but don’t forget about the delivery charge, because Kota is a big Christmas present!

He’s actually designed for under 10s, but will take the weight of a fully grown man. Not that I was riding him with a big grin on my face or anything. There are no photos to prove it so I’m denying everything.

Rob

Rated: from 1877 votes

© Kenwood

You remember the last series of Delia Smith? The one where she went a bit mad and started cooking frozen chips? Well a gadget from that programme has to be my kitchen gadget of the year.

The Kenwood CH180 mini chopper is marketed as a “Delia cheat gadget”, but it’s so much more. Until now, the only way to chop automatically was either a massive blender that took up a whole corner of your kitchen and could make the world’s biggest cake, or clunky miniature choppers that were more like children’s toys.

But the Kenwood mini chopper is small and powerful. It’s great for chopping herbs, onions, garlic, anything that’s too small for a large food processor. You need to chop up big veg before you put them in the bowl but a few pulses of the chopper and it’s perfectly shredded - and it chops really evenly and doesn’t pulp what’s at the bottom.

If you live on your own this kitchen gadget is great for chopping a portion of veg, or if you’ve got a bigger family you can use it for making dips, marinades, baby food - you name it, And it’s so titchy you can pop it away in the cupboard until the next time you need it.

For Christmas how about chopping stuffing, ingredients for gravy, herbs and marinade for the turkey, ice for slushies, nuts for the Christmas cake….

I have an admission though - I had one of these little kitchen gadgets well before Delia - you see not only is it great for chopping and pulping food, it’s perfect for chopping cucumbers for baby tortoise’s tiny mouths. Make sure you remember that tortoise fact - it might be important one day

Rob

Rated: from 1720 votes

© Sony

It seems like only recently that I was spending £700 on a VHSC micro camcorder, with the selling point that it had a colour viewfinder. It wasn’t recently, it was 15 years ago and I’m getting old, but you get the picture.

Now you can pick up a nice hard disk drive camcorder for a few hundred pounds, and take movies that are almost professional quality. But what should you look for if you’re buying a HDD camcorder this Christmas?

1 - Battery life
Like laptops, your HDD camcorder will race though battery power. You’ll be lucky to get one that can film for more than a few hours without needing a recharge, and that’s no use if you’re filming the family on a day out. If someone invents a battery that doesn’t run down after a couple of hours they’ll be made a saint - up until then, get the longest battery power you can afford.

2 - Picture quality

High def or not high def? As long as you’re not just looking for a bargain basement, point and click model, I’d say get high def every time. In a year or 2 it will be standard on all new TVs anyway, and an HDD camcorder without HD will be disappointingly outdated. It’s important to have a good optical zoom too.

3 - Memory

With the price of memory these days there’s no reason not to buy the biggest memory possible. HD video eats memory for lunch, but you can easily get HDD camcorders with over 40GB, which equates to about 6 hours of filming at the highest setting.

Make sure you think about what you’re going to do with the footage once you’ve shot it though. I wouldn’t fancy uploading 40GB of anything onto my computer, and if you think Photoshop or some computer games make your computer struggle, just imagine trying to edit footage from your HDD camcorder that would fill an armful of DVDs!

Rob

Rated: from 1867 votes

MP3 player for every household! stock.xchng © mrceviz

Back in the olden days, people used to have a stereo system. Then came Sony’s Walkman and you could listen to taped music on the move. Portable CD players made quality music on the move a reality, but you still needed your CD collection to make the thing work. And then came MP3.

Cheap portable MP3 players meant you weren’t limited any more in how or where you could listen to your favourite sounds. Keep an MP3 player in the car to connect to the CD player; and another in the office in case you’re desperate to hear Beyonce at lunchtime; and another for going jogging; you get the picture? Suddenly there’s no need to limit yourself to just the one music player.

I’ve got five at last count, with Creative Zen Nano plus MP3 players being my favourite. The Zen Nano plus is tiny, under 3.5 cm wide and 7cm long, and weighing only 34 grams with the battery so it slips into any pocket. Amazingly there’s no compromise on sound quality and product reviews are outstanding.

Forget the iPod and all the software it makes you download just to use it. You can plug the Creative Zen Nano plus straight into your PC and drag and drop the music. Job done!

These great-looking little gadgets come with up to 1GB of memory, a microphone built in and of course an FM radio. At around £50 they’re not the cheapest, but the build and music quality are second to none as confirmed by the product reviews. So even if your friends already have an MP3 player, they’re bound to appreciate one of these as a gift. Or why not treat yourself to one as your personal Christmas present? Surely you can never have too many MP3 players.

Or can you? How many have you got?

Rob

Rated: from 1679 votes