The shit presents we actually got

Christmas 2006 was even worse than initially predicted.



Next year we're asking everyone for money, even if it's just the £3.99 this generic man present cost.



Have we suddenly become 65 years old? We should be getting urban presents like scarves and satchels and Waitrose gift vouchers, not hankies.



There were more along the same lines as the above, but it was getting too depressing taking all the photos. The Jehovahs have the right idea about all this nonsense.

The batteries of Christmas - Huanyu

If Santa was nice enough to buy you a BT cordless phone, he might've cut costs a little bit by sticking ultra-cheap Huanyu batteries in the box instead of Duracells:



Huanyu - for power that lasts only halfway through the thankyou phone call to granddad.

Did you get any nice batteries inside your tatty electronic gifts this year? Then mail 'em in.

TINKO - Power that's not just for Christmas

It's Christmas. Everyone needs one very important thing at Christmas...

BATTERIES!




We've lost the email describing the circumstances of the discovery of the Tinko, but it may have been something to do with finding them inside some sort of exercise machine for women.

Our major regret for 2006 is seeing some really cool Fujitsu batteries with a nice retro Asian design, but forgetting to get a photo.

The shit presents we're actually going to get...

#3: A very small capacity USB drive



64MB. What can you fit in 64MB? "He likes computers, let's get him this - and it's only £4.99" was the reasoning behind it. Or it came free with something else. We are all that special.



What Uncle Paul doesn't realise is that we have two 1GB sticks in our fashionable urban manbag at all times. An additional 64MB isn't really going to help with the transfer of high-def porn movies between the various computers we watch pornography on.



Not to mention the constant worry we'd face were we to put anything of any importance on the world's cheapest, non-branded, Taiwanese memory chips.



In the bin by Boxing Day.

WHAT YOUR SISTER GETS INSTEAD:

An HDTV for the bedroom.

The shit presents we're actually going to get...

#2: Three DVDs from the HMV three-for-£15 range.



And we'll have to pretend we haven't (a) already seen them at the cinema or (b) downloaded them off Bittorrent or (c) thought they were all shit.



We always seem to get a thriller with Denzel Washington in, or something else that Jonathon Ross said was 'passable' if you're housebound and it's on TV.



And something that's supposed to be funny that we'd never watch, as we're MUCH too busy watching arthouse films by Almodovar and Bertolucci (this means we spend a lot of time wanking over Betty Blue) ever since we moved to a city and had to cultivate some sort of identity based around saying we like arty films.



On Ebay by Boxing Day.

WHAT YOUR SISTER GETS INSTEAD:

£28k in cash for a deposit on a house

A terrifying new development in iPod clothing

It's the Tunebuckle. An iPod belt.

"The iPod dock market might be dying, but the retarded-clothing-accessories- for-identikit-Hoxtonite-nu-meeja-cunts-and-students market is clearly alive and well" says Chris, who found this, probably on Gizmodo or Engadget, and sent it in to us.

We can't put it any better than that, so won't try.



The only saving grace is that the makers put loads of photos of TOP MODELS wearing it on their Flickr page:









You also can't go wrong with a patronising photo of the founder and one of the old men from the factory. Who will work in the factories when all the old men die?

THE PLACE OF 1000 HORRORS:
TuneBuckle | Let Go. Free Your Soul.

Something about the Samsung SCH V960

But only because they sent out a nice photo of it:



It's some kind of new phone. It would appear to have all the numbers including the emerging new number floffleteen, which is the new number that comes after 12 and before 13. The World Number Consortium had to invent this as all the numbers were being rapidly used up by the internet, mobile phones etc.

Floffleteen is only used on Japanese phones at the moment, and even then it's only used to dial floffleteen-floffleteen-floffleteen, which is the Japanese emergency service number for when giant lizards are attacking the government headquarters and immediate assistance is requi

Commodore Evic MP3 player - exclusive reader accidental purchase review!

A reader bought a cheap MP3 player. Turned out it was a Commodore Evic. Here is a review of how rubbish it is:

I bought a 20GB "generic mp3 player" off of some website for £50 because I work in a pub and have no money. Upon opening the box, it turned out to be a Commodore Evic (see attached photo) which I remember you mentioning some time ago, but you couldn't purchase as the website crashed.

So, so you can see what you missed, here are the features of this "amazing" mp3 player:



1. Can only be charged in the white docking thing, with an obscenely large mains plug. No cigarette lighter charging here!

2. Battery lasts all of 8 hours. Fortunately, I'm too skint to go on 14 hour flights to Brazil so this is not a problem.

3. You can load up m3u playlists, but it only plays one song at a time. When one song finishes, you manually have to select playlist, select the next song, and press play. Rubbish.

4. It took me two days to work out where the shuffle setting was

5. The manual says you can download upgrades at http://www.commodoreworld.com. Sadly, Commodore has erased all trace of the Evic from this website. Hopefully, it'll fuck up badly before the warranty expires and I can have my money back to buy an iRiver off Ebay or something.

6. Are you supposed to be able to hear the hard drive clicking?

What a great review! If you've bought something shit and you'd like to send us a review of it, send us a review of it.

The shit presents we're actually going to get...

#1: A DVD lens cleaning kit



Forget LCD TVs and digital cameras, nothing says "you're our third-favourite child behind your sister and that nice boy Chris from next door" more than mum rushing into Woolworths on Christmas Eve and buying something vaguely related to a thing she remembers you liking 10 years ago:



The worst thing about a DVD lens cleaning kit is the way it comes in a DVD case. You think it might be a good DVD like Superman Returns or Batman Begins, and although you've already seen them in the cinema it would be quite nice to own and have a copy.



But no. It's one of these. Better luck next year.



SHIT PRESENTS THROUGH THE AGES:

1970s: Cassette recorder head cleaning kit

1980s: Video recorder head cleaning kit

1990s: CD player lens cleaning kit

WHAT YOUR SISTER GETS INSTEAD:

A fucking car

TXT Quiz of the day!

'Needed' is a great word to type on your phone in predictive text, as you get to press the 'def' key FIVE times in a row. So is 'common' as you get to press 'mno' five times too.

Can anyone think of a six-presser word?!



The prize on offer is the chance to see your suggestions printed up here on this page beneath this article in the Comments section!

ONLINE CHRISTMAS PRESENT LIST #4: Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player

This one's for you, big sister. You've easily got £130 spare, especially now you haven't got to have the baby any more thanks to that backstreet abortion.



Yes, we know there's no point in HD-DVD as it looks the same as DVD unless you physically press your nose up against the screen (that cost £2000) and count the pixels, but it's not Blu-ray so that means we have to like it. Bloody politics.



"Not Blu-ray" - 10/10, Idiot Toys.

Creative gets in on the 'docking scene'

It's the PlayDock ZEN. An iPod dock for iPods that aren't an iPod, and are in fact a Creative ZEN.



It's for ZEN Vision:M and ZEN V and whatever other ridiculous combination of capital letters and colons Creative calls its MP3 players these days.



It can be carried, as confirmed by this official photograph.

YOU CAN ALSO LISTEN TO "ZENcasts" ON IT
We wonder how on earth Creative came up with the idea of calling something a ZENcast? More stuff about it here: Cambridge SoundWorks Zen dock thing.

Men gather around a new thing

Probably a graphics card or something.



Everyone got a photo for their tech blog and went home very happy.

The End.

Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray player reviewed

Basically it's a big, glitchy, slow pile of shit, but the reviewer is such a tech-geek he gives it a good score because he's all excited about having a Blu-ray. This is the battle we face.

THE BEST QUOTES:

"Pushing the power button, the BDP-S1 requires 12 seconds to display 'Power On'"

"Another 35 seconds elapsed for the player's alphanumeric display to read 'no disc' allowing the drawer to be opened and a movie BD ROM disc inserted"

"After the drawer closes, wait another 36 seconds for the movie studio's logo to appear on-screen"

"Hitting the remote required two to three seconds for the BDP-S1 to respond"

MORE WORDS IN A BETTER ORDER HERE:
HDGURU.Com » EXCLUSIVE: review Of The Sony BDP-S1 Blu-Ray Player

Stupid robot has another go

And still can't manage it.



We will sleep happier tonight, knowing that if there is a robot invasion they won't be able to penetrate the confines of our basement flat. We'll just step over their crumpled bodies in the morning when we go for a piss.

STUPID ROBOT SPAZ:
YouTube - Asimo takes a spill

Man inside Asimo suit falls over

Robot invasion delayed until at least 2045, as stupid billion-dollar robot fuck can't work out where its feet go:



That won't impress the chicks. Another small victory for John Connor and the rest of mankind!

"IT DOESN'T FEEL PITY, OR REMORSE, OR FEAR. AND IT CAN'T GO UP STAIRS"
Stupid robot fuck

ONLINE CHRISTMAS PRESENT LIST #3 Samsung N73 LCD TV

Dad, it's fine. It's only money you would've otherwise wasted on getting that wooden decking put in the garden. The garden's fine. The garden doesn't need covering in wood just because someone did that on TV last week. The house will be ours in 20 years anyway, and we'll just rip that shit straight out before you're even cold:



It's a Samsung N73 HD LCD TV. It looks like the Sony one but isn't by Sony and is therefore better and also less flammable and explosive.



It's also nice because Samsung has done away with that stupid angled bottom bit it always used to do. If it wasn't for that piece of 1970s design hell we might have given them £800 six months ago for a TV you can now buy for £500.



Samsung has also made a few Photoshop lies about the N73 to put on its website to convince you it makes conventional TV look better instead of MUCH WORSE.

MORE SAMSUNG LIES HERE:
SAMSUNG's Digital World - Television | N73 Series

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:

The Nokia N73 (they're making this way too easy for us these days, and poor old Samsung's not going to get anywhere in the Google search results as the first 1000 pages are all about Nokia's much more popular N73)

The N73 from Walthamstow to Victoria

The BMW N73 V12 engine

iPod dock industry in CRISIS

Only two were announced last week.





The real victims in this are the families of the millions of Chinese workers who are now out of work following this savage industry downturn.

HD-DVD: The words and grammar of stupid

Universal's slogan for its HD-DVD movie releases really is "The look and sound of perfect".

The look and sound of perfect.

It's right there. On the box and the disc for its HD-DVD version of King Kong. Teaching a whole new generation of children how to not speak properly, as if we didn't have enough problems understanding what that pale youth-thing just mumbled to us through a spliff already.



The look and sound of perfect?

THE LOOK AND SOUND OF PERFECT!
HD DVD - Official HD DVD

ONLINE CHRISTMAS PRESENT LIST #2 Sony Bravia V2500 LCD TV

Come on, grandma, you can't take it with you. Let us enjoy that five pounds a week pension money you've been squirreling away in that savings account for the last 20 years. Don't leave it all to the RSPCA - they just waste it on turkey for dogs:



Yes, we know. It's a Sony and an HDTV, the twin-towers of modern day consumer rip-offs, but...



...but it looks quite nice. And if we're going to have a TV in our room to never watch as we spend all our time on the internet these days, we might as well have a fancy LCD one that looks nice.

And if we never turn it on, it won't break or catch fire.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:

The International Aero Engines V2500

The General Motors V2500 SUV

The Mobile BlackBox V2500 USB FM transmitter

The Hoover Vortex V2500 Upright Vacuum Cleaner

An awesome email from Paul

It's awesome because:

It's about batteries

It includes images

He attached his favourite part of one image cropped out at a slightly higher resolution

It contains no spelling mistakes

PAUL'S AWESOME EMAIL

Good evening,

I see on Idiot Toys that you like to be sent unusual battery pictures. I'm afraid I don't exactly have one of those, but I do have an amusing Ni-Cd battery instruction leaflet from a radio-controlled car which I had when I was a child, which I subsequently found when I was about 18 and thought was hilarious and kept in a special folder of amusing junk.

I then scanned the leaflet in when the internet came along as I knew then why I had been hoarding so much amusing junk for so long - it was ready for the internet to come along and let me display it to the world. But actually I didn't really display any of it to the world - until now, if you want to do so on my behalf.

Anyway, yes, the instructions feature some entertaining cartoon battery characters, such as "Mr. Power". I think my favourite bit is the one saying "Oh, you're so dirty." In fact, I like that bit so much that I have attached it cropped out at a slightly higher resolution as well (Actually I did that at the time of scanning and thought I might as well dump that on you at the same time as the rest of this crap.)

Finally, I thought you might enjoy the particularly helpful instructions that came with some Sony earphones I bought around the end of 1999. I know you particularly like Sony so you will be delighted to see that they think their customers are so intelligent that they will not be able to work out how to use some earphones.

Goodbye,

Paul
Crayford/London

[There was then some stuff about how to download attachments to our PC. We think this was automatically generated by Hotmail, rather than written by Paul, so have removed it]









What a fantastic piece of correspondence. All you people who email us one line of barely legible TXT SPK and a link to a three month old story from Engadget need to learn from this. Thank you, Paul.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:

Paul

Paul

Paul

Paul

Paul

Now it's Samsung's turn to lose loads of money on mobile phone gaming

You think they might have learned *something* from N-GAGE's utterly disastrous performance. But no!



It can do "3D graphics" and display digital TV, which are two things no one ever uses a mobile phone for.

WHAT PEOPLE USE A MOBILE PHONE FOR:

A clock

Paperweight

Shopping list store

"We're going for a base on the moon"

Not us, obviously. NASA is. God knows how it can afford to do all this as it hasn't even got any Google Ads on its web site.



BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US plans permanent base on Moon

How many new iPod docks were announced in the week ending Friday December 1 2006?

Just four. The bubble has burst.

The new Sony Ericsson K620i

In blue. No one has been able to satisfactorily explain to us what the K stands for. They're not saying what fancy name they've come up with for this kind of blue, either. It's probably something nice like Summer Sky Blue or Wavy Sea Blue!



The K620i has a 3.2megapixel camera and 100MB of internal memory, which would do. Although it supports Sony's pointless Memory Stick M2 format. Which won't do. Plus it's by Sony, so will break or catch fire if you ever leave it unattended or switched on.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:

The Fujitsu FMV-K620 PC

The Toshiba SD-K620 DVD player

The Pelikan Special Edition K620 Ballpoint Pen

ONLINE CHRISTMAS PRESENT LIST #1 Sanyo Xacti CA6

Mum, you can afford this, especially now you're living in that car and don't have to pay rent any more:



The Xacti CA6 has a stupidly high 6megapixel CCD sensor, which is more megapixels than our existing boring old stills camera and than you actually need, plus it records MPEG-4 movies direct to memory card so it's easy to film things for YouTube. And it uses cheapo SD cards and has a 5x optical zoom. There's nothing shit about it at all.



It's also splash proof. In case you get carried away filming women's feet on the train without their knowledge or consent. It's only about $299, which is practically free given the current exchange rate between our money and Mickey Mouse War-Land dollars.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:

The Gardco-Emco Lighting CA6 straight aluminum pole

The CoreTech CA6 Series Single-Turn Absolute Encoder (dad's already said he's getting us this)