Great gadget gifts for everyone on your list

High tech gifting is sometimes a challenge, especially in today’s world of multiplying technical standards. Will Accessory A work with Gadget B? Does your beloved prefer Firewire, USB 1.0 or USB 2.0? And while you may find the coolest case ever made for the iPod Nano, that won’t do your sister much good if she owns an iPod Mini.

Before you give up and resort to Jerry Garcia ties, fluffy bedroom slippers or Shania Twain’s greatest hits, however, here are some high-tech present ideas that should let you think more about compatibility with your loved ones than about with their hardware.

Starting with preteens, here are two good possibilities: first, the new FLY Pentop Computer from Leapfrog. The $99 FLY is an electronic tour de force that’s basically a scanner shaped like a large pen that uses special paper. Write on the paper, and the scanner not only reads aloud, but processes the information — if you write an appointment, it will remember and remind you at the proper time. Write a math problem and the pen solves it out loud. And there’s more: it plays music based on drawings, for example and includes a series of pen-based games. It’s educational, in the Leapfrog tradition, but it’s also so novel that most kids probably won’t figure out it’s supposed to be good for them.

Don’t feel like something educational for Christmas? Also for preteens, but not as vitamin-packed, is the Game Boy Advance SP SpongeBob package, which for $99 gives you the latest Game Boy Advance — with a new back-lit screen — decorated in SpongeBob dressing, along with two games based on the hugely popular cartoon franchise. The new screen is a considerable improvement; the double game is a nice Christmas bonus.

If your teens have iPods, they've probably already bought at least a few of the approximately ten million accessories now on the market. But here’s a piece of hardware that may have been out of their price range: the Altec Lansing inMotion iM7 portable audio system, which works with all iPods except the Shuffle. Unlike many of the smaller external speaker systems for the iPod, the$249 inMotion puts out great sound with plenty of volume, and since it runs on batteries or AC power it can be used either on the road or as a full-time bedroom sound system.

If your teen doesn’t have a digital camera yet, the Canon PowerShot SD200 is an excellent compact camera that’s lately seen price drops and rebates bringing it below $200. It has a large LCD viewfinder, the traditional great Canon optics and electronics and a slim metal body. The price is dropping because its 3.2 megapixel count is low by current market standards — yet that’s still plenty of resolution for most purposes.

The Eton FR300 is a wind-up emergency radio that can also be run off batteries.

How about new spins on old-fashioned radio? The Delphi MyFi is a pocket-sized satellite radio receiver that can be used in both home and car, as well as (in most locations) on a stroll around the block. Keep in mind that the recipient will also need to pay a monthly subscription fee, but you can throw in an XM gift card to cover the first few months.

The Eton FR300 is a totally different kind of radio: a wind-up emergency model that covers AM, FM, the weather band and VHF television. It also includes adapters to charge a number of the more common cell phone models and is a bargain at about $50.

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