We haven't ranked our picks, but we have put them in a rough chronological order. Think of it as a guided tour through the various circles of gadget hell—and feel free to have a little guilt when you spot the ones you've owned (or still do). Anything we've missed? Share it in the comments. There have been thousands of gadgets released since 2000, and we're sure there are at least fifty more out there that should never have seen the light of day.

Update: OK, now all you gallery haters can view the embedded all in one long skinny post, if you prefer. Here you go. You're welcome.

TouchWiz is the first custom Android interface that's worse than the standard one, and shows what kind of horrible things emerge when Samsung's interface designers are left unchecked. Here's how I think the design process went, roughly: The designers dropped a bunch of acid, stared at old Atari games while binge eating Taco Bell, then proceeded to shit all over the phone for hours and hours.

If it's not inherently ugly, like text input screens with awful '80s neon orange and blue, it's gratuitous and redundant, like the 3D app cube. Or an entirely separate menu of Samsung icons for apps. And some things, like moving the slide-out menu to the left instead of its traditional place on the bottom, actually work against the way you use the phone—the menu gets in the way now, since I'd often bring it out by accident while changing between desktops. It's just... terrible. Worse, Home Switcher, an app that reverts phones back to the stock Android home screen, can't erase Samsung's disgusting mojo. The Behold II would be 10x better with a vanilla build of Android 1.6.

Even the phone hardware is a mess. The front of the phone is an orgy of buttons: seven, to be precise, not including a d-pad, with a dedicated button for the app cube. The lock key isn't just on the side but it's kind of hidden, flush against the bezel. The USB port is weirdly shoved on top. And, uh, what the hell is up with the back plate?

Two things are good about the Behold II—Samsung's custom camera setup comes straight out of their point-and-shoot cameras, and is packed with features, like extensive manual controls and burst shooting, and it's very fast, unlike the rest of the phone. The other is the AMOLED display which is nice, though marred by the same kind of bluish tint as Samsung's other AMOLED Android phone, the Moment.

Take a good long look at the Behold II though: It's a warning to other developers what not to do, and a scary look at one dark possible future for Android, in its infinite permutations. Not just deep fragmentation of the platform, but customized crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of Android. It makes me want to cry, except that my brain's too mushy to make my eyes work.

The original Peek, which just runs email, is something I would never buy in a million years. But I could understand why some people might like it. It's simple, its inexpensive, and it lets you run email without paying for a fancy smartphone plan. That's fine. Email is important and universally useful.

But this? Twitter only? Twitter is something that you can do easily on a smartphone, yes, but it's also something you can use easily on any phone. It's a service based on text messaging, for god's sake! In practice, you could use Twitter on your phone no matter what phone you have. Hell, even StarTacs supported SMS and could use Twitter, if you happen to still be using one.

Maybe they expect this to be used by people without cellphones at all? Why would anyone carry a device that does only Twitter instead of getting a basic free cellphone that can call friends and restaurants and companies with phones (all of them)?

And really, if you're so hooked on Twitter than you want to have it on you at all times, the chances are good that you're also hooked on email, IM, texts and probably the services that a few other apps would provide. This is a device built around an app, basically. The iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android all have great Twitter apps. But do they deserve their own devices? What's next, a dedicated Fieldrunners or Yelp device? How about a batman utility belt full of like 20 devices each doing the equivalent of one app, for seven bucks a month, each?

Sure, one could argue that it chooses to do one thing and to do it well, with simplicity and affordability. You could compare it to the Flip, for example, which makes shooting video easy and cheap. But the Flip does far more, for the money, and decent video isn't something you find on most smartphones. The Flip beats camcorders by doing 90% of what they do for 20% of the cost. This does 1% of what smartphones can do for 25% of the cost. It's just not a good value, despite it being cheap.

The real kicker? This thing has one single function, and it can't even do that very well. PC Mag just gave it 1.5 stars! This is totally damning:

But as soon as I started handling the TwitterPeek, I knew something was wrong. This handheld is painfully slow. Scrolling through button selections or on-screen lists, the cursor is always a bit behind your trackwheel.

TwitterPeek also fails at the most basic function: reading tweets. The main list of tweets only shows the first three and a half words of each message; to read more, you have to dig down by hitting the 'return' key. Then you can step through tweets, slowly, one by one, with the 'n' (for next) and 'p' (for previous) keys, or jump back up to the unreadable full list of truncated messages. The whole process is slow and annoying.

Not everybody wants or needs a smartphone, such as the iPhone or Droid. They're relatively expensive and cost more per month than a dumbphone. But the fact of the matter is, if you're looking to have a lot of mobile functionality, it makes way more sense to consolidate your needs on one well-designed product than to clutter up your pockets with a dumbphone, a TwitterPeek, a digital camera and a GPS unit. This is a device that is built on flawed logic and executed poorly. I can't think of a single person in a single situation where this would make sense.

I just can't believe this thing exists.

It's all bullshit, of course. Like Monster Cable and that $500 Denon Ethernet cable, there's more snake oil flowing through this "premium" socket than anything else.

And as with that Denon Ethernet cable, the comments from "satisfied users" are what really make this product worth "investigating." Buyer beware. [Parts Express via Boing Boing]

We've been watching Windows Mobile 6.5—or Windows Phone, as Microsoft is sometimes calling it—for months, since Jesus first laid his thumbs on it back in February. We even taught you how to install developer builds! The final version I got for testing, though, was almost identical to the builds we saw so many months ago. This means two things: That we already know what it's going to look like and how it's going to work; and that no, it's nowhere near the upgrade that Windows Mobile needs to be even remotely interesting.

It's a superficial update, and not a very thorough one. It's an interim product, and a vain attempt to hold onto the thinning ranks people who still choose Windows Mobile despite not being somehow tethered to it until the tardy Windows Mobile 7 comes out, whenever that may be. And it won't work.

The Interface

The first thing you'll notice about Windows Mobile 6.5 is Titanium, the new, menu-style homescreen. It's large and typographical, and looks almost Zune-like. This is an auspicious start.
Each menu item provides a shortcut to an app, function or widget, and most have some kind of preview capability: you can flip through photo thumbnails, see missed calls, and thumb through emails, calendar appointments and Internet Explorer favorites without leaving the homescreen. Scrolling is smooth, and has an inertia that 6.1 so conspicuously lacked. Likewise, the new lock screen brings some information to the surface, but not much. (It'll let you know that you have a text, but not what the text says.) Too bad you probably won't see Titanium, ever, since handset manufacturers will almost certainly cover it up with their own custom homescreen.

The second most obvious change is the Start Menu, which Microsoft is so proud of that they've required all 6.5 phone to include a dedicated button for it on all "Windows Phones" a la the Windows Key on a PC. Again, it's striking, and again, it's smooth. This one, though, feels more like a design concept than a final product. For example! The only tool you're given to sort apps is a "Move to Top" command—no dragging, no alphabetical sorting, nothing except this bizarrely-chosen menu command that makes organizing apps feel like completing some kind of horrible puzzle game.

On top of that, there's no way to tell how many apps you have, to delete them, or to tell which "Page" of the start menu you're on. The offset icon spacing is awkward and occasionally ugly, and hey! That Windows button? It doesn't behave like you'd expect it to, opening the Start Menu but not closing it. This whole piece feels half-assed, to put it kindly.

Another well meaning, if not quite adequate change is to the contextual menus. Though they're ordered exactly as they were before, they're now huge and thumb-scrollable.

Things get worse when you move past the surface, revealing an OS that hasn't been fundamentally changed in years, and which bears a strong resemblance to Windows Mobile 6.1, and a startlingly not-weak resemblance to PocketPC 2002. The new homescreen Start Menu, lock screen and contextual menus are just veneers, and they're not very thick.

The remaining interface changes are subtle, and intended almost solely to make Windows Mobile 6.5 bearable to use without a stylus. (Though don't get me wrong—most WinMo 6.5 devices will, damningly, still come with styluses.) It doesn't really feel like a redesign—it feels like someone went through 6.1 and adjusted a few values. Add a few pixels of menu spacing here, some plasticky highlight graphics there, and BOOM. 6.5. Let's go to lunch.

The terrible Windows Media Player app looks the same, the photo albums are helped only by smoother scrolling and support of basic swipe gestures, and the text, email, notes and settings pages are jarringly old-looking, and seriously hostile to pointing devices any larger than a pen. Especially fleshy ones.

Come to think of it, after using 6.5 developer builds for a few months and then switching briefly back to a 6.1, the only thing I really missed was the system-wide inertial scrolling, which replaces 6.1's chunky faux-physics scrolling engine with something that at least behaves predictably.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile

Windows Mobile finally, finally has an app store—quick, look around, is there anyone left who doesn't? The interface is bit awkward, falling somewhere between the large-typeface aesthetic of Titanium and the barebones HERE'S A LIST sensibility of the rest of the OS, resulting in odd text overflow in menus (sort of like on the Zune HD, except less pretty.) You can find apps though a sensible system of categories, or by searching, and downloading and installing is as easy as pressing a button, though you'll occasionally be met with prompts from the app installer.

I can't really pass judgment on the Marketplace's offerings just yet—it's only been open for a few hours, and apps seem to be flooding in at a fairly steady rate—but the initial offerings are pretty bare, counting among themselves just a few free apps, nearly all from Microsoft, with cameos by some recognizable Windows Mobile app developers who are still obliviously charging upwards of $20 for apps that wouldn't break $5 in the iPhone App Store.

Don't get me wrong, the Marketplace is a good thing, in that it'll drive prices down and make finding apps much easier, but it remains to be seen if developers will take to it like they did on the iPhone App Store, or just kinda ignore it like they did with the BlackBerry App World. In any case, this isn't even a 6.5-exclusive service, and just about any app written for 6.5 will work on 6.1 and 6.0, and vise-versa. A victory for Windows Mobile, sure, but not one that 6.5 can claim as its own. A few more notes on the Marketplace:

• Users are entitled to a 24hr refund

• You can browse apps either on the phone or on a website

• Charges go to either your phone bill or CC bill, though nobody's signed on for carrier billing yet.

• 6.0 and 6.1 gets the Marketplace in December

• Marketplace will only show you apps that run on your specific phone

• Apps can only be installed on internal storage, despite the fact that you can manually install apps on an SD card with no problem.

• App purchases are tied to your Windows Live ID, and which can be used on up to five phones. Seems a little lenient, but hey, thanks!

My Phone

Another touted feature of 6.5 that will also happen to be available for every other Windows Mobile phone, My Phone is a decently capable backup service. We've seen most of it before, but today there are a few new features in top of the super-simple backup service that Jason went so far as to call "fancy:"

• Phone wipe will let you remotely purge your phone

• Locate your phone lets you put it on a map, in case you were wondering where it went/where you neighborhood petty thief eats lunch

• You can search text messages

And I kind of love this one:

• You can switch your phone from silent/vibrate to full volume remotely, in case you lost your phone in the couch and just need it to ring

Alas, these cool extras will be part of a premium version of My Phone, price TBD. UPDATE: It's free until November 30th, after which it's $4.99 for 7-day access (most of the premium services are for emergencies, so this makes sense). The free user experience will be a lot like the beta, which is to say basic, but useful for backing up contacts, photos, and other basics on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The web interface is nice, too—more on that here.

The Browser

The confusingly-named Mobile Internet Explorer 6 is to Mobile IE 5 what IE 7 was to IE6 on the desktop. Get that? This is to say it's a massive upgrade, but like IE7, which added tabs and popup blocking about two years after everyone else had it, Mobile IE6 is at least a generation behind its competitors. For what it's worth, it adds smooth panning and scrolling, intelligent zooming and full(er) support for CSS and Javascript pages that MIE5 used to choke on spectacularly.

Rendering is good, but not WebKit good, and the browser has a tendency to reflow text in an odd way, formatting columns of text more narrowly than it should. And even though rendering is vastly improved—though inexplicably, not to the point of the Zune HD's browser—the experience is still glitchy. Page loading is slow even on a fast Wi-Fi connection, and there's often a pretty wide gap between when a page looks like it's done and when the browser actually becomes responsive enough to interact with. In short, you're going to want to install Opera or Skyfire, the former for faster rendering and easier navigation, and the latter for better Flash support (IE6 includes Flash Lite, which is better than nothing, but can't stack up to Skyfire's compressed full-Flash trickery.) And hell, one of the two will probably come with your phone anyway, because whoever sells it to you probably wants you to like it.

Of course, you won't be able to completely abandon IE, since Microsoft is planning on using it for a new Windows Mobile widget platform. This sounds like a bigger deal that it is—these are just web apps, not desktop widgets or anything like that, but they'll rendered using IE6's engine, and be available in the Marketplace, mixed in with the other apps.

Performance

Microsoft isn't really advertising the SUPER SPEED of Windows Mobile 6.5, which makes sense: 6.5 is based on the same underlying Windows CE version (5.2) as 6.1, and even 6.0. In other words, its guts are oooold. In practice, this means that cold app launches are quick enough, but not noticeably faster than 6.1, even on slightly more powerful hardware. (A Touch Diamond2 for 6.5, and a Touch Pro for 6.1)

For Windows mobile, the perception of slowness has always been more of a problem than actual slowness, since flashy animations are sparse, and the manner in which apps load, close and minimize can look a bit clunky. The smooth scrolling and easier navigation at least give the impression the 6.5 is a little leaner and less laggy, but there's not much new going on under the hood to back that feeling up.

That said, I don't see why not, since ROM cookers the world over have been squeezing impressive speed out of Windows Mobile for years now, and have even done some admirable work on 6.5 pre-release.

The Crux of the Problem

Last month I reviewed the HTC Touch Pro2. It was too expensive to recommend, but its software was a pleasant surprise. Contextual menus had been skinned with larger, finger-friendly buttons; there was a panel-based app launcher; the supplied browser was pretty good; certain version had a replacement for the start menu; and hey, there was even inertial scrolling across all apps. The catch, though, was that this was a Windows Mobile 6.1 handset. HTC had replicated almost every feature of 6.5 with their own software tweaks, and provided a much better homescreen than Titanium with TouchFLO 3D. All before 6.5 even came out. Install My Phone and Marketplace for Mobile on there, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single reason to upgrade to 6.5.

To put it another way, handset manufacturers have done more in the last two years to improve Windows Mobile than Microsoft has, which borders on pathetic. In the time since Windows Mobile 6.0 came out in February of 2007, Apple has released the iPhone—three times. Palm has created the Pre, with its totally new webOS. Android has come into being, and grown into something wonderful. RIM has created a touch phone and a revamped BlackBerry OS. For these companies, the world has changed.

And Microsoft? They eked out some performance enhancements and a new homescreen in 6.1, and executed a gaudy facelift for 6.5. This is what they've done to Windows Mobile. What's amazing is that in the time it took Windows Mobile 6.1 to lazily morph into 6.5, Microsoft—Microsoft!— designed one of the most spectacular handsets I've seen in years, loaded it with brilliant, inspired software, a decent web browser and a fledgling app store. One problem! It's wasn't a handset. It was a Zune. I understand the the two platforms aren't directly comparable, and as is, Zune OS wouldn't work very well for a smartphone, but it's a taste of something great. And why on earth does the HD have a better browser than Microsoft's smartphone OS? It's almost like the Zune team was trying to embarrass the mobile guys or something. And to their credit, if they're looking for it, they did.

Just Not Enough

Judging from the first wave of 6.5 handsets, the change OS will barely be noticeable to most folks. Alternative interfaces like TouchFLO and TouchWiz will remain, and won't outwardly change, nor will included apps—they're all compatible. Customers will buy Windows Mobile phones based on the quality of their 3rd party interfaces; carriers will continue to carry them because certain people, chained by their employers or a specific piece of software, will need them; and app makers will be slow to take to the Marketplace, since hey, how much longer do these Windows CE 5-based OSes even have left? It'll be a sad, long slog until April (or god forbid, December) when Windows Mobile 7, whatever it is, finally hits phones.

I'd like to think that 6.5's stunning failure to innovate is a symptom of a neglected project—maybe Microsoft just needed something, anything to hold people over until the mythical Windows Mobile 7 comes out, whatever it is. But as Steve Ballmer himself has plainly admitted, it's worse: Microsoft has simply lumbered in the wrong direction for two years, letting everyone, save maybe Nokia, fly right past them. [Microsoft]

The new start menu, homescreen and lock screen at least look like they're from 2009

The default browser is acceptable, whereas it used to be horrible

MyPhone and Marketplace are welcome additions and both show plenty of potential, but both will be available on pre-6.5 phones

The core of the OS is almost exactly the same as 6.1, and 6.0 for that matter

It never takes more than a few finger taps to get from the pretty, new 6.5 interface, to the blocky, old, finger-hostile one

Seriously, it reminds me of Windows for Workgroups

After carriers and handsets manufacturers have their way with it, it will be literally indistinguishable from 6.1.

The Nuvifone G60 GPS phone is out this week for $300, an absurdly high price for even a smartphone in this age. But the Nuvifone is not a smartphone, not even a clever one.

What's Bad

• The resistive touchscreen reminds me of phones circa 2006, bad for everything but big-button tapping.

• There's no homescreen button, to quickly take you out of a mire of menus.

• It's crashy—screens froze twice while I was writing this, forcing a full-on hard restart.

• Sometimes the accelerometer just stops working completely.

• The camera is terrible—if the hardware button required for the shutter even works—and there's no video of any kind.

• The web browser is all but useless, because it relies heavily on zooming in and out, and the touchscreen easily confuses swiping and tapping.

• The interface looks cool at first, but there are strange design choices throughout. Want an example? The QWERTY keyboard only appears in horizontal mode—it's ABCDE in vertical mode. Also, no "Where To?" button, a la older Nuvi devices.

• You have to pay a $5/month premium charge to check the weather, traffic, local events and other services—all of which can be found on free apps from real smartphone platforms (not just iPhone).

• Even when using email (let alone calendar), there doesn't seem to be any awareness of the rest of the internet: The email wizard lets you enter any address and password, but it doesn't say whether it can actually get mail. This tenacious little phone is still trying to log onto my Hotmail account.

• The battery ran down completely during my first day of testing, after a few phone calls and some modest GPS navigation, and the battery indicator drops fast when it's just on standby. In fairness, you shouldn't use this phone or any other phone without a car charger, if you intend to use it for GPS navigation.

• There is no car charger. It's missing the $7 USB-to-cig-lighter adapter. AT&T probably wanted to sell it separately, but when I asked at my local AT&T store, they didn't even carry it.

• Since it's an AT&T phone, it has to compete with the iPhone and other handsets that are way better. If the Nuvifone were on Verizon, it would at least have a network advantage in certain markets that it could lord over the iPhone herd. But even Apple haters would have a hard time spending an extra $100 on this—with the exact same phone reception.

The Verdict

Unlike most reviews, this verdict isn't for you. If you made it to the end of the headline, you already know what to do. But because I care, I thought I'd say something to the makers:

Garmin: Please get your act together in the phone space. You have two choices: Either make tidy useful navigation apps for the major platforms, or make real phones. There's no such thing as a PND that also makes phone calls (though I think that was the original plan for the G60).

You are great in your field, but even teamed with Asus, you aren't better than the lowliest phone maker, so you have to play catchup: Pick a mobile OS and stick with it. Skip Windows Mobile (for now) and make a serious push into Android. To do that, you'll have to see what everyone else is doing. Don't just set yourself up to lose in the end to an HTC running a TeleNav or TomTom app. You're good at making tough hardware, so why not differentiate with a rugged outdoor Android smartphone?

I urge you to re-consider your premature departure from the mobile app business. Garmin brand equity would sell a lot of iPhone apps, especially if they came with the Nuvi interface most people love more than TomTom's or Navigon's. It may bruise the ego a bit to focus on software instead of hardware, but I just don't see how successful you can be by doing what everyone else is doing, only later and worse. I didn't mean to be this harsh, but I also didn't expect the G60 to be so bad.

In Brief

The home screen is cool for a dumbphone, with three major buttons and a slider of auxiliary options

The navigational experience I have enjoyed on regular Nuvis is here, almost completely intact, but since you can already get that without buying this phone, it's not a major plus

See above—like, every single word of this piece

Or better yet, do what I do: Forget this thing and take out one of those archaic dead tree cookbooks, turn a few pages, and read the mysterious "ink" that resides on them.

No? Still craving the frame? OK, then some details... The $271 8-inch digital frame plays 48 instructional videos featuring chef Brian Turner. The action can be controlled by the included remote control, which we hope is waterproof or otherwise protected from flying food in some way.

When not in use, say the day after Christmas when this goes into the closet forever, the frame doubles as a calendar and photo frame. Bon appétit, chumps! [Appliancist via Engadget]

What is an ebook reader? It is your relaxation companion, the screen you will stare at when the laptop is closed and the TV is off. In that sense, the ability to provide tranquility must always trump the latest trick. Pack in touch screens, pack in SD card readers, search, dictionary, library-book borrowing. You can pack it all in, but never, ever at the cost of that primary role. With the $300 6" resistive-touchscreen Touch Edition, Sony fails to heed this simple agenda. With the super-simple $200 5" Pocket, Sony seems to be flaunting it.

Mind you, neither are Kindle killers, but they never were supposed to be. They are cheaper than Kindle, in a niche all by themselves. They represent Sony's third try at elusive ebook reader success, using its own bookstore and the necessary computer connection instead of pairing with a retail giant and a 3G wireless provider. Speaking of that, Sony takes on the now $300 Kindle with its $400 3G-capable Daily edition, which we hope to review in the coming months.

Touch Edition Up Close

The Touch, which I've been using primarily, has a lot of flaws but battery life isn't one of them: I charged it 11 days ago, and it's only now starting to die. The touch interface provides a relatively organic way to turn pages, though I always flick in the wrong direction. (You push your finger towards the next page, rather than flicking the current page back.) Update: You can set the turn motion to go either way. Thanks Weatherman!

When you tap words—with a fingernail or the included stylus—you get an instant dictionary definition, and a quick way to search an entire tome. The interface isn't going to win any awards, and the dictionary doesn't know a lot of words that it should, mainly past participles ("overheated") or gerunds ("deteriorating"). But if those were the only issues, I'd say jump in—it's a nice enough player priced well under the Kindle.

But the screen, oh God, the screen. Sony's problem with glare continues unabated, and because the soon-to-be-launched 3G-connected flagship Daily edition also has a touchscreen, the glare problem is likely to sink that as well.

Blinded By The Light

What do I mean by glare? I mean that, lying in bed, with just my reading light on, I can see the perfect out line of my face. Sure, I am handsome, but when I read a book, I expect to be staring only at words on the page, not my own lovely mug. In a well-lit room, the glare from all sides is positively frustrating, and it shifts with every minor adjustment of my hand.

More and more LCD screens on laptops come with glossy finishes, and that can be a pain when you're surrounded by natural light. However, LCD is back-lit. The light coming from within the screen combats the light bombarding it from outside, so you can still see a lot, and you can always jack up the brightness when you can't. E-Ink isn't backlit—that is its benefit. When done right, it looks like paper, with zero eye strain. But if you put a shiny membrane over that E-Ink, as Sony has done here, you get undefeatable glare—and eye strain galore.

Gimmicks Test Well

When I brought up this problem with Sony, they told me that touch was a huge selling point for focus groups. I can appreciate that, and can see how Sony thought this product "tested well," perhaps in a setting where people are not reading for hours (or days or weeks), but are just messing around with the neat-o gadget. Also, anyone who only has the experience of the Touch edition may not realize there's a whole world of glare-free ebook readers, from the Kindle to iRex's Digital Reader, which actually has a touchscreen. It's too bad Sony couldn't figure out (or buy) iRex's secret.

The people in the Touch focus groups should have been given a Pocket Reader too, as I was.

Pocket Edition Up Close

Literally pocketable and way cheaper, the Pocket is far more capable of delivering hours of peaceful reading. As you can see in the images, side by side, the screens couldn't be more different. It's not just relatively glare free, it has better contrast for even easier reading. The Pocket's problem is that it is barebones to an almost insulting degree: No search, no dictionary, no card reader, no nothin'.

I could actually live without all of those features save one: Search. Keyword searching is to future readers what leafing around is to current ones. Don't remember where you last saw the mysterious man in black? Do a quick search. The Pocket has bookmarks, so you can dog-ear the pages you want to remember, but search is about not having to remember—it's about hindsight, not foresight.

Reward for Patience

In the end, I can't recommend either device wholeheartedly, but I can tell you that if you plow through books fast and dirty, without jumping around a lot, you could do worse than drop $200 on the Pocket. It's simple, it's easy on the eyes, and for the time being, it's the cheapest ebook reader out there. Add to that this lending-library feature that hopefully launches soon, and you could get the first reasonably budget reader.

The pricing situation will change dramatically within 12 months, but maybe not by Christmas. The iRex and Plastic Logic news we hope to hear by then is all about 3G Kindle competitors, probably in the $300-$500 range. There's also this little thing about an Apple tablet that I can't seem to forget about. One thing is for sure, no matter who the competition is, Sony is going to have a rough holiday season if that Daily's screen is anything like the one on the Touch. [Touch Product Page; Pocket Product Page; Sony eBook Store]

Sony Touch Reader

Lots of features including one-tap dictionary, super-simple search, SD and MS card readers

$300 price too high for a device with no 3G

Glare glare glare glare glare... and did I mention the glare issue?

Sony Pocket Reader

Great compact size (actually fits in many pockets)

Its screen—unadulterated E-Ink—is as good as Kindle's

Currently the best list price for an ebook reader

No touch interface, which may bother feature hounds

No helpful search function, no dictionary, no SD card reader

The book I was reading is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Lev happens to be an old friend of mine, but I'd recommend the book regardless, an R-rated post-Potter tale of a teenager's induction into a magical university, fast paced and full of great insider references not just to Rowling but Tolkien and CS Lewis as well.

Sure, the standard def video was serviceable, but when cheaper point and shoots do the same or HD video, a purpose built camcorder has no excuse for not blowing them out of the water for cheaper. And it's only waterproof to 6 feet. Miserable! Also, the camera liked to focus on the water droplets on its lens like a cross-eyed idiot. Unlike the very presentable Lumix DMC-TS1 from the same company, please avoid this piece of defunct technology. One nice thing: It comes with a floating strap. But, again, if you buy this, you are dumb. [Panasonic]

The fact that it exists.

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

We all know there are plenty of products that cause more problems than they solve. As a professional technologian, my job is to sift through innovations to see which ones make for an improved life, and which ones are too troublesome for their own good.

CatGenie—pardon the pun—gives me pause.

After spending a month with it, I declare that it is the perfect zero-sum innovation. Every single advancement comes with drawbacks. While my wife and I no longer suffer from any of the problems associated with a traditional litter box, we are beset with an abundance of unanticipated others.

CatGenie is one of these SkyMall-type gadgets that bills itself as the "World's Only Self-Flushing, Self-Washing Cat Box," tossing in, for good measure, a weighty promise: "Never touch, smell, or buy cat litter again." You install it easily by splicing the cold water line from underneath your toilet, running a waste tube up around the lip of the same toilet, and plugging the contraption into the wall. You pour in beads that resemble litter enough that cats get the idea, and you click in a replaceable cartridge of cleaning agent.

When the automatic cleaning cycle is engaged, a mechanical scooper removes the poo, and detergent-infused water floods the box and then drains, taking any trace of funk with it. The moistened beads are then blown dry, like Ron Burgundy's hair, as a sweet floral scent fills the bathroom and any adjacent living quarters. The crap in the toilet is easily flushed away, as long as you remember to do it.

Compared to the alternative of sifting out chunks from a litter box and tying them off in environmentally uncool plastic bags, this is a beautiful promise. Because of the automatic setup, there's no chance of getting punished by your cat for forgetting to clean a box frequently enough. Everything I described above happens exactly as billed. And even our dumb neurotic brother-and-sister act somehow figured out how to use it very early on. They weren't even intimidated by the swirling Sarlacc pit that it becomes during cleaning. My key initial fear turned out to be totally baseless.

So why does the thing make me yearn for the days of the scoopable Arm & Hammer, even though PetNovations Ltd says there are 82,940 households already enjoying this contraption?

When I first watched the cleaning cycle, with my gadget-lover's grin, I marveled at the swirling and churning and slooshing and clacking. I kept marveling for about 15 minutes, by which time my grin had soured, and I was looking at my watch. By minute 25 I stormed out of the bathroom in annoyance, came back at minute 35, shocked that the thing was still doing its business, and then returned again, sometime after it had stopped, roughly 40 minutes after it had begun. CatGenie recommends that for two cats, the process should run two to three times a day. That's two solid hours of cleaning cycle.

The installation is stupid simple, but you need to be within 8 feet of both a power jack and a toilet (or laundry water line and drain). If you think that's easy, stick your head in the bathroom—very few have power jacks anywhere near toilets, and I had to run my power cord up along the back of a sink. It's not a hazard, but it looks like Wilson's Amateur Home Improvement Show down there.

CatGenie is also massive. Its basin has about half the volume our cats are used to, but because of its wide surrounding lip and the tower of machinery, the system is probably 25% larger than a good-sized plastic litter box.

After a few days, we discovered an interesting characteristic of the non-toxic litter beads: They do not absorb odors. Right around 8:30 every morning, our big male cat, Wade, comes trotting up the stairs with a combination guilty/relieved look on his face, and soon after, we are engulfed in a sickening stink. Mind you, the cats' depository is an entire floor away down the stairs in the guest bathroom. Scooping the offending dung into the toilet would defeat the purpose of owning a robotic litter box. ("Never touch litter again," they promised.) My sole move is to, yep, run the damn machine.

Only the problem doesn't go away instantly. In fact, it gets worse before it gets better.

As the detergent floods the basin containing Wade's leavings, the whole thing becomes a savory poop stew. Even when we run the fan in the bathroom, the smell is unbearable for about 10 minutes, after which it disappears instantly, replaced by the machine's pleasant perfume.

I kept telling myself that these problems are just growing pains, things to get accustomed to. CatGenie is not as messy as a litter box. There's none of that residual ammonia smell that you can't get rid of permanently, and for the most part, none of the crusty extras that come from overzealous (or just misguided) burying. The plastic beads manage to find their way all over the house, and I am embarrassed to confess, our 1.5-year-old kid manages to stick one in her mouth about every two weeks, but they are non-toxic plastic beads after all, and nothing that can't be vacuumed up.

At least, I once told myself, there are no more plastic bags full of poop and urea headed out to some landfill. I read somewhere once that San Francisco had solved something like 90% of its trash problems, and that the remaining 10% was cat and dog poop in plastic bags. (Not the actual stats, btw.) At least by switching to a bagless litter system like this, I'm being environmentally kosher, right?

Not in the least.

During every cleaning cycle, CatGenie runs a built-in hair dryer over all the beads for about 20 minutes. I plugged in my Kill-a-Watt meter and discovered this demanded a constant and alarming 1160 watts of electricity. For up to an hour per day, I am running the equivalent of four large plasma TVs, just so I don't have to touch litter.

The costs start to mount. Besides the up-front $300 and the daily running of water and electricity, the $15 cartridge needs to be replaced every 60 cycles—that is, every 20 to 30 days. And the scatter-prone beads need to be replenished every three to six months, at $24 per carton. Like an inkjet printer, the maintenance costs continue forever, making the notion of buying a $7 box of Arm & Hammer every two weeks seem all the more reasonable.

Despite all these negatives, a great debate rages in my household: I would like to return to the olden ways of scoop and bag, and my wife says, "No." Her argument, a good one, is that the bathroom has never stayed cleaner. Guests have to step around an awfully large contraption, but at least "it doesn't feel like you're walking into a barn."

As Sigmund Freud once explained, moving from the wilderness to the towns didn't solve humankind's problems, it just swapped out the rustic difficulties for more urbane ones. His conclusion, though, was that while life still sucks, there's a reason we don't move back to caves. After experiencing a more civilized litter box, I can't revert to scooping poop, but I impatiently await the next evolutionary leap in cat sanitation. [Product Page]

In brief:
After cleaning it's amazingly fresh

Cats took to it almost from the start

Sounds like the TARDIS when it runs (could be a minus for some but not me)

Easy installation

Can run automatically up to four times per day

Empties into toilet that must be flushed

Non-toxic clean beads get all over house

Beads don't kill odor

It's huge and must be stationed near toilet and power plug

Self-cleaning cycle runs over 40 minutes, smelly at the start and hot at the end

Hot-air bead dryer demands 1160 watts of electricity for about 20 minutes

No way to stop cycle once it has started

The price: $50

The price, again: $50 (seriously?)

The verdict: My eyes are now all screwed up. Seriously.

The Wazabee 3DeeShell is essentially an iPhone case built around one key feature: a 3D screen filter. Obviously it can't turn the OS into a 3D experience, but the Shell promises to offer glasses-less 3D in the form of stereoscopic images you can take on your iPhone (with the purchase of their $1 3DeeCamera software).

I don't know where to start with the shortcomings of this product. It's a train wreck of molded plastic, a product so horridly useless, even amongst novelty gadgets, that it should be banned from sale in the free market.

There's the issue of the design. Once you slide the 3D filter onto your screen, you can no longer navigate the iPhone. Therefore, while using their software (that's not free with my $50, otherwise completely useless purchase?) you need to continually move the filter up to hit a button, and then down again to see the results.

You can capture "3D" photos by taking two slightly different pictures of an object and combining them in that $1 software I mentioned above. I was unable to do so without crashing the program (though to be fair, this might be my firmware 3.0 getting in the way). However, I was able to 3D-ize an existing photo.

The result is not quite as good as any bad hologram I've ever seen, mostly creating the illusion that the photo was ever so slightly sunken in my display. It's a tad better than 2D in terms of depth, but the results are quite blurry, and the extent to which it fucks with your eyesight is not worth the 2 minutes of near-entertainment.

(In case you believe my 3D-izing skills to be lacking, I also tried out their free space shooter title. I don't know what to say about it other than the game's fun level is on par with creating Excel spread sheets and it in no way appears 3D.)

45 minutes after testing, I still can't focus properly with my left eye. I'm not sure what a few rusty nails go for these days, but it's gotta be less than 50 bones.

There's simply nothing worthwhile about the Wazabee 3DeeShell that can justify either its existence or its please-punch-me-in-the-face cutesy name. Given the laughable price and (temporary??) damage to my vision, I don't believe that I can recommend the purchase, nor can I recommend any programmer create content for the "platform" when its SDK hits later this month.

Also of note, in some unnecessarily cruel twist of fate, I can't get this shell off my phone. Thanks Wazabee. You guys are the best. [Wazabee]

At a later time, I was able to remove the shell from my phone

Following several years of therapy, the doctors believe I will see again

Product birthed by Satan himself

Seriously. Why? [Casetation 2 at Flickr - Thanks (?), Akshay]

As though that glowing monstrosity sitting on your desk wasn't enough already, this tool of Satan gives you a 1.5-inch, 128x128 screen that can display an entire megabyte (!!!) worth of photos. What next? Digital photo frames on my speakers?! On my phone?! On my digital photo frame?! But if this is your thing, by all means shell out another $23 and support the digi-frame invasion.

And laugh if you want, but when you're running down a dark alley shouting "PILLS HERE," you'll regret not taking me seriously. [Memory Cup via Coolest Gadgets]

If you seriously can't stop salivating over this thing, it's $20 at FredFlare. [FredFlare via technabob]

Seriously, I think I saw this thing in the Penny's catalog back when I was growing up in the 90's, and I know I saw it in Quantum Leap somewhere. And it's heavy too with the .1-lb. weight drooping more than a few ears to the floor with its massive, eye sore bulk.

At least it's only $20 now with free shipping. Get it for someone you hate today! [Gear Diary]

Normally, we'd call a $106 keyboard that boasts no significant features—aside from deadly cuteness and the ability to make grown men say "No, seriously, this is for my kid sister, honest" on command—a ripoff, but since this cat would skin us alive, we'll stay quiet. Goes well with this, which is also pink, and therefore adorable.

Works with Windows XP, Vista and assorted torture devices. [Geek Stuff 4 You via Coolest Gadgets]

Even the packaging, by design, screams "EAT ME!" And, also just like the candy, these buds come in multiple colors for maximum toddler confusion: Red, pink, blue, orange, and white.

At $10, they're pretty cheap, which is good because ER visits aren't. Available "soon," possibly in the candy aisle or next to Maxell's other new product, the Pencil Scalpel.

Update@8:33 p.m. EST: Regarding the packaging. Approximately 14% of Americans are illiterate. [Coolest Gadgets]

Enticing marketing copy seals the deal:

Nothing lifts the spirits like a good yodel, but most of us don’t have the skill to yodel on cue. That’s where the Emergency Yodel Button comes in. Keep this 4″ x 3″ x 5/8″ plastic device with you at all times and when the need arises, press the button to hear the sweet mellifluous warbling of an alpine yodel.

That's certainly correct. I neither have the ability, nor the desire, to emit a skilled yodel on cue. Costs $12.50 and your dignity. FYI: Goes well with this. [Archie McPhee via Red Ferret]

Get them while they last when they arrive in January for about $130. [B4Tech]