Great gadgets game goes online this year

Try this gadget mantra for 2008 - go online, or go fishing. Might as well use your offline gizmos as bait. The fish, being dumber, might just bite!At least that's what the gadgets for 2008 seem to suggest. Most gizmos - and not just phones and notebooks - are now being judged not only by whether they can go online but what they do once they get there.For folks living in India, the phone to own would certainly be iPhone (about $500), when Apple launches it in the country this year.For notebooks, the keywords are accessorise, accessorise, accessorise. A good way of doing that would be Slingbox Solo ($190). This nifty little utility allows you to watch your television anywhere in the world, on your laptop or mobile phone.Solo is a streaming device that connects to equipment such as your digital video recorder (DVR), satellite system or cable box to deliver high quality TV signals anywhere in the world. Watching your favourite shows while travelling around the world can't be a bad idea.The solo's easy-to-use software, SlingPlayer, also allows laptop users to watch their favourite programmes and use applications like MS Office at the same time. Bosses, beware.For TV watchers, LCD or plasma has just become skinny with the super-slim OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs that Sony and Samsung have started flaunting around. Expect a commercial launch this year. A TV with YouTube built-in is not too far off either.Video also seems headed for portable media players.Now that downloading movies off the net has become so quick and easy, more and more people will be investing in them. Philips, Jukebox and other players have come up with flash-memory based personal media players (around $200), which are hot buys with 3.5-inch screens, built-in speakers and five-hour video lives.Meanwhile, digital media adapters (around $200), designed to let you enjoy music, pictures, and video on the PC and laptop on TV, are rapidly gaining popularity. In many cases, these smart set-top boxes, like the SlingCatcher, can also deliver content directly from the web.On the imaging front, your digital camera and camcorder need no longer be stranded from the net. The EyeFi Card ($100) has arrived, which lets you upload stills or footage directly to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or what have you.The just-announced Belkin Bluetooth USB Adapter ($40) with a picture upload technology is another example of the "get-your-digital-stuff-online" trend. It uploads camera phone photos to your PC and then to services like Kodak Gallery, Facebook and MySpace.Digital photo frames are also becoming a worthy buy. Coming in varying sizes, the one that leads the pack is Photoskin by Emtrace Technologies. The size of a credit card, it features a 2.5" high definition LCD display, 128 MB memory and 64 MB SDRAM.With it you can upload your favourite photos or display a variety of widgets, such as weather, news and more. The widgets are only functional when Photoskin sits on the included cradle and is connected to a computer.For printing, nothing now holds a candle to the "Zink" paper enabled Polaroid mobile photo printer. The new-age Polaroid, slightly larger than a pack of cards, carries no toner, ribbon or ink.Instead, the connected camera heats colour spectrum crystals embedded within the 2-inch x 3-inch zero-ink paper to bring the high-quality image to the surface. Like the Polaroid before it, this gadget has the potential of changing how we take and print digital photos.With so many portable goodies, charging could be a nightmare. Charger pads with the right adapters could make life so much easier. The leader on this front seems to be the Wildcharger "wireless charging station" (about $100).A flat charging pad that will charge any compatible device - up to five at a time - without the use of any wires sounds tempting. This much-admired invention of 2007 could make it big in the market this year. Various adapters cost extra, though.In the wireless scene, a Bluetooth speaker system is where the action is. This brand new device receives and plays music wirelessly from any Bluetooth-enabled player or phone.Let's round up the list of hot gadgets with the Kindle ($400), launched late last year by Amazon. The handy wireless reading devices that can download and hold over 200 book titles could become all the rage this year.Kindle stays charged for as much as a week. It also includes exclusive subscriptions to top US and international newspapers and magazines, 250 blogs, e-mail capability and Wikipedia access. So that's how electronic paper looks.The cloud is now truly the king. We want the whole web, and we want it now