It’s not just stocking stuffers that are sold this late into the holiday shopping frenzy. I’ve seen some fairly large items in both size and price going out the store’s doors with less than 15 minutes to lights out. So if you are running out of time but have the budget, here are 3 gadgets to look at this year, that are over $2000.
Super Gamer Laptop – Toshiba Qosmio X500
Ok, so you’re looking to buy a computer for the ultimate gamer, but still want it to be portable? How does an 18.4″ screen grab you? Consider the Toshiba Qosmio X500 Laptop ($2199). With its black casing with red accents – just like racing stripes on a sports car, it’s been called an enthusiast-class performance notebook. Its TrueBright technology display yields a crisp sharp picture with a high definition 1920X1080 resolution.
It uses the latest in Intel technology, using the Intel Core i7 processor, plus Intel® Turbo Boost and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology allowing the work, or should I say play, happen all that much faster.
This road-runner comes standard with 1 terabyte of drive storage (2 x 500GB to be exact) and 6GB of memory. To maximize visual reproduction, it uses the high-powered NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M graphics with 1GB of DDR5 video memory. And if they ever get tired of playing games and want to watch movies, it has a built-in Blu-ray DVD player, too. It comes with Dolby Home Theatre audio sound and built-in and Harmon Kardon speakers. Oh yes, I almost forgot – it does come with an LED backlit keyboard.
Industry’s first 60” LCD TV- Sharp Aquos LC-60E77UN
There are bigger and there are smaller, but Sharp has just released the industry’s first 60” LCD HD TV – the Aquos LC-60E77UN ($3,299). It features their Super View Superlucent 120Hz technology that focuses on providing the finest detail in an HD image and refreshing the screen at 120 frames per second -double that of a standard television, smoothing the motion especially with fast moving images and at a speed of 4ms.
To maintain a sense of realism in the reproduction, it has a Spectral Contrast Engine that actively monitors and analyzes the picture to provide best dynamic colour range as well as a sense of depth. It can also automatically adjust the pictures brightness to compensate for room lighting.
It has a viewing angle of 176° both horizontal and vertical allowing you to see clearly from almost any point. It has over a dozen input/output connectors that allow you to attach to a fair number of devices.
It’s sweet. It has a stunning piano black cabinet with a champagne golden accent with bottom mount speakers that would look nice in any family room.
Apple’s Power House – 8-Core MacPRO
If you are looking to surprise the budding developer or power-monger with the ultimate machine and price is no option, then the 8-Core Apple MacPro just might be way to go.
It’s not a laptop, sorry, but it’s one heck of a high-powered desktop. The base model sell for $3799 and features 2 x 2.26GHZ Quad-core Intel Xeon processors (that’s how it has 8 cores). It comes standard with 6GB of high-speed 1066Mhz DDR3 ECC SDRAM. And to super-size this box, sorry MacD, you can optionally select 2 x 2.93GhZ Quad Core Intel Xeons.
There are 8 memory slots, so you could go up to a total of 32GB of ram. The standard drive is 640GB 7200 Serial ATA, but you can go as high as 2TB. There are also 3 additional bays to add an additional 6TB of storage.
Graphics are also fast using the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB. You can have up to 4 of these, if you have a RAID Card and Fibre Channel cards installed. Alternately you could look at the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB for a few hundred dollars more. There is an optical drive – an 18x SuperDrive and there’s room for a second one too.
All decked out with a 30″ Apple Cinema HD Display will run you just over $18,000 – buy hey, it’s only money.
If you’re wondering what, what makes the MacPro a speed demon powerhouse, I can let you in on a secret. In addition to Apple’s innovation, it’s the processor and Intel’s Microarchitechture with a process code-named “Nehalem” and the efficient way in which the data is handled and made available to each of the processor cores. (If you are interested, you can read the Nehalem whitepaper.)
Some of these items may be in stock at your favourite outlet – but also check on-line, some outlets are making items ordered on-line available for pick-up on very short notice.
Happy Holidays!
Greg Gazin – The Gagdet Guy!
Tags: apple, aquos, gadgetguy, Gaming, gifts, HD, lcd tv, macpro, Mobile, Qosmio, sharp, toshiba