mum's the word
Buying the right gift for Mother's Day is a challenge. Flowers are beautiful but wither in three days and are forgotten in four. Chocolates are great but are consumed in a day and you'll be yelled at about 24 hours after that when mum stands on the scales.
Hot chocolate One chocolate you can safely buy for your mother is a stylish handset from LG Electronics' Chocolate Black Label series.
If you can score one of the limited-edition KE800 mobile phones (left) - just 6,000 are available worldwide - mum will know you really care.
This sleek black handset, with its touch-sensitive, backlit red keypad, is banded in 14-carat gold. The two-inch TFT screen displays 256,000 colours at 240 x 320 pixel resolution. It's a fully equipped multimedia phone, with quad-band GSM connection and support for GPRS and EDGE networks. It also has a 2-megapixel autofocus camera with flash and video-recording capabilities, MP3 player, FM radio, voice recorder and a Web browser. If you can find one, it costs HK$3,380.
News flash Has your mother been bitten by the photo bug? If so, she'll love the new Canon PowerShot TX1 digital camera (above right). It measures 88.1mm x 59.9mm x 29mm and weighs 220 grams (minus the battery), so it can slip easily inside a handbag. The TX1 shoots still images with a 7.1-megapixel camera, 10x optical zoom, Face Detection technology, optical image stabiliser and an ISO rating of 1600. It also shoots high-definition videos at 720p (1280 x 720) resolution in widescreen, shooting at 30 frames per second and storing the videos in Audio Video Interleaved format. It records at 44-kilohertz stereo sound and has a wind filter, which is useful when shooting outdoors.
It has a 1.8-inch LCD monitor that swivels 270 degrees, 14 scene modes and Canon's 'My Colours' technology, which allows the user to adjust the colours of photos, including settings for lightening or darkening skin tones. For storage there is a choice of SD, SDHC, MMCplus and MultiMediaCard. Make mum happy for just HK$3,280.
Music to her ears For mothers who love their iPod almost as much as they love you, a new set of iPod speakers may hit the right note. Altec Lansing has long been one of the leaders in the field of portable iPod speakers and the company's new inMotion iM600 speakers (right) are its best release to date.
Compatible with all iPods except the Shuffle, the iM600 has a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery that provides up to seven hours of continuous play. It has a full-function remote and FM radio capable of four presets. Most impor-tant, however, is the sound quality.
The iM600 features a rich bass sound without needing a subwoofer and uses proprietary signal processing, which Altec calls the Stereo Field Expander, for an improved stereo effect. There is an alarm clock feature (which works only in conjunction with the iPod, not with the internal FM radio) and an auxiliary input for playback of other devices. Nice extra touches include video output and a USB port, so mum can synchronise her iPod with your computer.
The iM600 measures just 283mm x 43mm x 152mm and weighs 900 grams.
It costs HK$1,539.
