Entertainment

Yes it’s true shop now have their Christmas displays – and not just at Harrods – so it must be autumn. Here are two items that are likely to be on your kids wish lists.

Maxfield, the German developer of personal audio products, has expanded its range with the release of its Max-Movie device.

This is a music and FM radio player, it can also be a rather good voice recorder. All this in a very tiny case that easily sits even in the smallest palm.

Having recently had the use of the Goodmans 37inch offering this one came in as the other was returned, same screen size but a little bigger and somewhat heavier.

Two or three times a year a get the chance to tell you about my hobby Jazz, here are two further CD’s from a label with a jazz section.

A truly portable DAB radio that can run for the best part of the day on a single charge on it’s built in battery. Now could this be a true portable DAB radio.

“No man is an island” according to John Donne and Tony Ellis is obviously of a similar opinion especially when it comes to his stick people.

From the same company that makes the excellent DigiFusion dual tuner unit with hard disc, this is a basic Freeview box at a basic price.

Managing your digital music can be simplied with a title such as Helium Music Manager.

Howzat! For the umpire’s decision on this new electronic cricket game – read on.

Yes I do mean wireless, not just no aerial lead, no mains lead either and it will work at any angle you require, so you can even have it sitting on the bed beside you if you so wish.

If you make long train/tube/bus journeys then this could be for you. You could watch last nights TV on your way to work, not on some tiny screen but this 7inch offering.

Yes I ended up looking at this during the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Open Golf but I actually requested it a couple of months before. First surprise it weights a lot less than my conventional 28inch.

Grabbing VHS tape content for conversion to digital format is the role undertaken by the Grabster AV400.

Is it a pen or a USB device? No it is a G-FLASH METAL

This is a toy I saw at the start of the year at the Toy Show, in it’s simplest form they are a set of two cubes with LCD screens, place them together and they interact, even leaving their own cube to visit one another.

Children like to imitate adults especially when it comes to fashion and accessories.

I assume that the Metal part relates to the tin box it comes in but it could be the case of the unit, this is a MP3/WMA player that has a rather good voice recorder with it.

Accessing music from different sources can be carried out by a device such as Terratec’s Noxon 2 product.

This is a DAB and FM radio, as supplied it works on mains but can be run on standard batteries or the proprietary ChargePAK from Pure.

Philips have often been at the forefront of innovation and this MP3/Picture Viewer/Voice Recorder certainly stands out from the competition.

Last years series of articles after the Dream Toys event in the autumn was well received. So in January I went to the slightly different Toy Fair, here are two items.

Bored with the lighting in your house? Lighting doesn't generally get more dynamic than on and off. The Lava Lamp of course introduced the concept of 'moving light', well the 'laserpod' takes that idea and pushes it into the 21st century.

DAB radios are becoming more advanced, features that only appeared on very high level offerings now are available on mid range systems, here the new offering from Pure-Digital the Evoke-3

What do you do in the kitchen? Whatever it is, you will probably appreciate a kitchen device designed to entertain.

This is an MP3/WMA USB player and voice recorder that is aimed at kids. Not only does it have 256MB of built in memory but can also play content on SD/MMC cards.

As SCART becomes the defacto standard for home electronic devices, you could find a product such as Smart-SCART-PLUS useful.

This is three products in one. On the face of it an upmarket Integrated Headset with MP3 player, also an MP3 player with earbuds, finally a rather good set of Headphones.

For those who are fed up being tethered to a headset this solution may suit, however if you work with others they will either have to put up with hearing your conversations or you will need to use an earpiece and that rather negates the advantage.

Earphones are fine for personal MP3 listening but for group purposes you really need a set of portable speakers.