Thursday 30 November 2017

Best gifts under £100: great Christmas ideas for tech lovers

You don't have to spend a fortune on technology to get an awesome present, as our best gifts under £100 guide proves.

Ok, we admit it. Sometimes we go a bit overboard with our gift suggestions. £1000 laptops and £500 speakers? Who can afford that? Some, but not all.

This round-up addresses that little issue. We’re looking at great Christmas gifts that cost less than £100.

We’re not scraping the barrel with phone cases and touchscreen gloves that most people don’t want, though.

These are the affordable picks we’d be happy to open on Christmas morning. 

Jabra has created a pair of wireless headphones that have an exciting design and strong performance - all for a price that's well under £100, hence their entry in this here guide. 

The Move Wireless are an excellent budget option for couch potatoes and fitness buffs alike. This is because they are lightweight and have a surprising knack for great sound performance, a bit like that friend we all have that belts out a karaoke tune after four pints of the strong stuff. 

From the fun and edgy design to excellent performance, these cans come recommended for anyone interested in wireless on the cheap.

Yes, we know the SNES Classic Mini sold out four seconds after it went on sale. And if you’ve been looking on eBay, you’ll often have to spend well over £100 just to get hold of this £80 retro gadget. 

However, every now and then it pops back into stock at the biggest online retailers. The game over screen isn’t here just yet. 

The SNES Classic Mini is a miniaturised take on Nintendo’s classic 16-bit console, one that uses an HDMI, not the ancient connectors of the original. It has 21 games including many SNES classics: Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart and the otherwise unreleased Star Fox 2. If this can’t solve that 4pm Christmas Day lull, nothing will. 

A big divide is opening up in smart home tech. Are you with Google or Alexa? It’s an important question as this will likely affect the sort of smart home tech you can control in the near-future at least. 

For the sake of this gift guide, let’s side with Google and its Home speaker. It also sounds a bit better than Amazon’s latest Echo, and Google gives you slightly better control over your privacy settings.

Google Home acts as a decent wireless speaker and the digital housekeeper. It’ll control other smart home gadgets, let you ask for trivia/info and set reminders and alarms. And a lot more besides. 

Android tablets haven’t quite improved to the extent we hoped back in 2014, but when the Amazon Fire HD 8 costs just £79.99, we don’t really mind. It’s powerful enough to play high-end Android games well, has a solid 800p LCD screen and at 369g is light for a tablet. 

It’s especially useful if you’re an Amazon Prime member, as you’ll have access to the services that form a big part of the tablet’s interface. The Amazon Fire HD 8 software is based on Android, but you might not know that looking at it: Amazon has changed it a lot. 

Even without Prime, you can still download thousands of app, plenty for free, and read Kindle books on this tablet. 

For PS4 gamers, a PlayStation Plus is like a pair of socks or load of toiletries that they’ll actually want. Buy a subscription for someone and it’ll simply stack on top of their current sub, so you don’t have to worry if they’re already signed up. 

PlayStation Plus enables online multiplayer in PS3 and PS4 games, and gives the player access to a new selection of “free” games each month. You might want to check if they’ve had PS Plus before and decided it’s not for them, though. 

Xbox gamers will want Xbox Live Gold instead. Same benefits, (roughly) the same price, just for a different platform. 

You can’t get one of the fancy “new” 3DS or 2DS consoles for under £100, but the old 2DS is still widely available for all the budget buyers out there. The most common current bundle comes with Mario Kart 7, which is worth £30-plus on its own. Bargain. 

The 2DS is the cheap and cheerful model in the 3DS line-up. It feels a bit plasticky, doesn’t have 3D and looks like a techy piece of toast. However, it’s still a great handheld and can play almost all 3DS games. 

Just a few games require one of Nintendo’s “New” 3DS models, Xenoblade Chronicles 3D the most important of the lot. Make sure that’s not their most-wanted title before buying. 

The Raspberry Pi 3 is a remarkable piece of technology. True, it may not be the most revolutionary upgrade from the Pi 2, but it builds upon a rich community of support and maintains a level of backwards compatibility to boards and projects created for earlier models of Pi to be used.

The arrival of wireless communications on the board enables IoT projects at a lower price point and helps further the goal of the Raspberry Pi, providing a platform for tinkering and experimentation that's low cost and well supported.

And it's all for cheaper than the price of a video game. Fantastic stuff.

The Moov Now excels at one, very important thing: it’s a fitness tracker that actually tracks the things that make you fitter.

You get guided workouts for major activities that are well thought-out, or just good, broad tracking for daily activities.

A six month battery life is immense, and if your goal is to spend more time in bed each night and move more each day, this little wearable is an affordable and accurate way to do it.

If you’re looking for a feature phone and have fond memories of the original 3310 then you may be drawn to the reboot - and you'll likely be happy.

But if you're keeping a keen eye on your finances you can get the same spec (and in some cases better spec) for a lower price tag if you ignore the headline-grabbing "3310" name.

The new Nokia 3310 has the fun nostalgia element, a good design and some much improved features that all combine to form a solid, dependable handset



from TechRadar - All the latest technology news http://www.techradar.com/news/best-gifts-under-100
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