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High-tech holiday toys

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NEW YORK -- Technology may the simplest way to answer that age old holiday question, "What do I give a person who seemingly has everything?" After all, the constant goal of most high tech device manufacturers: create something totally different, something people have never seem before, yet can instantly find a need for.

Take for example this seemingly average SD memory card for digital cameras. In addition to storing your pictures, the $99 2GB Eye-Fi card also syncs to your home wireless network, helping you silence all those friends and family who nag, "when are you going to post online all those pictures you took the other day?"

“As soon as you turn it on, the card will look for your home wireless network and any new pictures you've taken, any new content on the card will start to automatically stream over to the destinations you've described,” says Yuval Koren of Eye-Fi. “If you are working with one of our online photo partners, those photos will start going up to the web in real time. If you’ve configured it to send photos to a local folder on your PC, it'll go there as well.”

High-tech holiday toys
The MagicJack looks like a simple USB thumb drive for your computer, but plug a standard telephone into the other end and for $40 the first year, $20 a year thereafter, it allows you to make unlimited phone calls in the U.S. and Canada. That includes calls you make to the U.S. and Canada even if you happen to be overseas. It also offers some of those nifty premium features you'll find from more established online phone services like Vonage or Skype, like virtual voicemail and a system to find you when you're not at a computer.

“If this is unplugged or if your computer is turned off, you program in up to three numbers to find and when someone calls the phone number associated with this it finds that other number,” says Mel Arthur of Magic Jack.

Finally, if you don't necessarily feel comfortable picking out a brand new gadget for a loved one this holiday, but you have a vested interested in helping them clear up the clutter generated by the ones they already have, meet the charge pod.

“It charges six devices at the same time, weighs about one ounce and can charge everything from Palm Pilots, iPods, Blackberries, Bluetooth headsets, PDAs, MP3s, of course cell phones, it can be powered from a car charger port or a wall outlet,” says Darren Guccione of CallPod.

One warning: after you pay the $50 price tag for the unit and one adapter, you stick the gift recipient with a bill for $10 for each additional adapter he or she will need to make it work properly.