Hold off on buying that wireless Internet phone for Christmas. They seem to stump too many people, unless you're in the mood for giving one to your favourite techno friend.

Remember all those phone calls and the ungrudging advice to get you out of a spot of bother with your computer? Well it's payback time.

Last year I described the most coveted techno-toy as the Aibo, a robot dog with a character made by Sony (www.aibo.com). Early models last year sparked a huge fan club of owners at www.aibonet.com and the fad.

The price has now fallen to US$1300 from about $2,500 last year. It's the future and I don't like it.

This year I'd like to get i-O Display Systems' i-Glasses. It's a portable DVD theater masquerading like an over-the-top pair of sunglasses you saw in an Schwarzenegger movie (check out the video at www.technoscout.com).

The newest model, the i-Glasses SVGA, claims to deliver the illusion of full-color, binocular views equivalent to a 75 inch screen at 13 feet. You can plug the new model straight into a computer for gaming or for working, or to a DVD player for watching movies, depending on what connections and accessories you want to buy.

It's six ounces in weight. The 'lens' are made of liquid crystal on silicon, and apparently work according to the reviewers. The batteries The i-Glasses SVGA cost about US$1000 plus the price of the accessories, although there are more scaled down models going for about US$80 at the www.i-glasses.com site.

I wonder if airline security will let you take such a fancy gadget on board these days. It also might be a bit unsettling at first to be shut off from the world that way in this virtual theatre.

However I can see that some form of the i-glasses could become standard airline gear, with the stewards handing out the movies of your choice, just like they do the magazines and newspapers. Shame to miss the sight of all those clouds.

Another gadget that attempts to scale the techno world down is the Clever Cam 360, which attempts to be a digital camera, webcam and camcorder in about five inches in length.

The Clever Cam pen camera is able to take up to 360 digital pictures or store up to 45 seconds of streaming video, the manufacturer claims. I can't imagine what the quality would be like and the product has been plugged endlessly like a trashy toy on television (always a warning sign), but at US$90 it looks like a reasonable toy for children who are starting to get interested in taking digital photographs.

A cheaper gift to give is a domain name. Lots more have been made available through the introduction of new domain name affixes recently.

You can pick up a domain name for US$10 at www.gandi.net, including ".info" ones.

Although a domain name gift is not much fun to open on Christmas, you never know when a $20 domain name purchase can turn into a $20 million site. Still it's a quick and easy gift.

Watch out this year for a smart buy in the personal computer market. Prices have fallen due to discounting and the lower cost of components. Analysts are saying there are bargains to be found, even in the high-end market. You' re looking at computers with 256 megabytes of RAM, hard drives with between 40GB and 80GB of space, a CD-RW drive and DVD-ROM drive.

Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Dell have recently launched models in the $900 to $2000 range. A Compact Pavilion model (without the monitor) with a 2GHz Pentium 4 chip, 512MB of RAM, a 80GB hard drive and a DVD-rewritable drive comes in at about $800 in the US. You can work upward from there to figure out the price in Bermuda.

If a weekly poll of tech industry professionals by the TechRepublic Community Research Group is any indication, those that work in the information technology sector want the gifts we would all like.

Tech specialists want digital cameras, laptops and handheld computers.

Network administrators want the same things, but lean towards a preference for high-end rewritable DVDs. Developers are a more expensive breed.

In the poll, one in three said they wanted 'high end' PCs (well who wouldn't?), while others asked for rewritable CD drives and digital cameras.

Executives seemed to lean more toward the toy mode. They were the only category of professionals who requested the Xbox gaming console (www.xbox.com) from Microsoft, which debuted on 15 November.

Fifteen percent of the executives surveyed said they wanted an Xbox. One in three asked for digital cameras. A ZDNet reviewer says Xbox is an "impressive piece of hardware" but that it takes an extra amount of time to learn how to use it and the games. No matter, the suits will need some thing to play with while they're waiting for the tech crew to get on with it.

By the way TechRepublic is a great site for information technology workers to keep on top of a wide variety of very technical subjects.

The site has about 20 focused weekly newsletters, which you can receive or not depending on what subjects you want to get information on regularly. The media site was purchased by the Gartner Group last year.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. You can contact Ahmed at editoroffshoreon.com or (33) 467901474.