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Except that this year I'm pretty stumped.

Have there actually been any "must have" new products launched this year?

Maybe wireless internet access could be the geek's best friend, although coverage areas are still rather limited and nobody yet knows exactly what sized data-caps will finally be fixed by companies such as Whoosh.

Certainly there's been little to jump and shout about in terms of new PC hardware this year. Sure, processors have gotten incrementally faster and video card performance continues to improve if gaming is your bag -- but no real "gee whiz" items fell from the sky.

Maybe a WiFi network would be appropriate if your home, like mine, has become a mass of cables and wires, but even this technology is now pretty old-hat.

Perhaps a digital camera? Well they now have more megapixels for your dollar and memory cards seem to have come down in price a little but, once again, no stunning new features or technologies.

The Xbox and PS2 are now both more than a year old in the NZ marketplace, although xbox-live looks set to become the latest and greatest addition to console-based gaming. Unfortunately it involves the use of Telecom's expensive and potentially risky 256Kbps DSL service. I wonder how many parents will buy access to this service as a Christmas present for the kids and then end up with a huge over-cap data bill early in the new year?

Parents be warned -- this service could bankrupt you if your kids are hard-core gamers.

One accessory that may well be growing in popularity this Christmas is the tinfoil hat.

Yes, now that the authorities are empowered to snoop on your every word, your emails, computer files and soon even your cellphone conversations, I can see an increasing number of folks wearing this shiny headwear so as to protect their very thoughts from "big brother" :-)

However, I know what I'd like more than anything else this year, and I'm sure there are many others who'd also enjoy such a gift -- if it existed.

I refer to a 100 percent effective spam filter.

Yes, you've probably already noticed that, in the lead-up to Christmas, spam levels are going through the roof -- and they're bound to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

In my column for the Christchurch Press this week I warn people not to rely on email as a reliable or timely form of communications over the coming month. With spam rates set to triple, quadruple or worse as shonkey marketers try to dupe dim-witted Net users into buying flaky goods as gifts, I strongly suspect that many of our data-circuits and mailservers will be totally saturated with this dross.

The addition of spam filtering only makes things worse as ISPs systems work hard to sort the wheat from the chafe.

And then there are the e-cards. You know, the cyber-equivalent of the Christmas card which says "hey, I'm too cheap and you're far too unimportant to justify paying for a stamp".

But tell me -- what do *you* want the fat guy in the red suit to bring you this year?

What is the ultimate (affordable) hi-tech gift this year?

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