PC World Editors' Holiday List

Sugarplums, PDAs, MP3 players and plasma displays fill our heads and our letters to Santa.

Yardena Arar, PCWorld.com

One of the best parts about working as an editor at PC World is checking out the latest and greatest in personal technology. But in case you're wondering, we don't get to keep the products we review. Like everyone else, we have our holiday wish lists--which in some cases include tech toys we've actually had a chance to audition.

So, here's a word for Santa: Should you be inclined to drop one or two of these goodies down our chimney, our principal editorial offices are in downtown San Francisco. We'll leave milk and cookies in the kitchen!

Chic Tech at Home

I Want My HDTV: This is a wish list, but I hate to go overboard. So I'm only asking for a 42-inch HDTV-ready plasma television (hey, they come even bigger). My specific request: Sony's WEGA KE-42TS2 ($7000 list, less online). This beauty offers an amazing 1024-by-1024 resolution, a 16:9 aspect ratio, a built-in NTSC tuner, and a depth of only 5 inches. In fact, Santa, if you'll get me the display, I won't trouble you for the HDTV tuner ($800), roof antenna ($100), and wall-mounting bracket ($270) that I'll also need. After all, that would be greedy. --Tom Mainelli

Draw (Again): Maybe it's a good thing that Santa made me wait a year for the Cintiq LCD touch screen from Wacom that I asked for last year. Now I'll find the newer $3499 Cintiq 18sx and its 18.1-inch SXGA screen under my tree on Christmas morning rather than the $1899 15x model with its measly 15-inch XGA display (the only one available last Christmas). Some things truly are worth waiting for. --Dennis O'Reilly

Upsized Palm: The AlphaSmart Dana is a cross between a laptop and a Palm OS PDA--a battery-operated full-size keyboard with a backlit LCD screen (11 lines deep with a large font, 14 with a smaller one) that blends the convenience and portability of a PDA with the power and comfort of a full notebook-size keyboard. The feature I most covet is its capability to transfer all the text I write on it (and save in its 8MB memory) directly into any open PC application--word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, or whatever. It's a $399 productivity tool I can take anywhere without incurring the expense of a notebook. --Michael S. Lasky

Palm Plus: I'd like a Palm Tungsten T, but with Pocket PCs dropping to as little as $200 or $300, I just can't bring myself to plunk down the $499 or so it costs--so I'm hoping to get it as a gift. I'm also partial to Creative Labs' Prodikeys, an imaginative combination of QWERTY and piano keyboards. --Harry McCracken

Surf City

Armchair Shopping: Since I hate crowds but like to shop, I'd like to get gift certificates for my favorite Internet stores: Geerlings & Wade, a wine store where I can stock up on champagne for New Year's Eve, and Amazon.com, because you can never have enough books and CDs. --Randy Ross

Merrie Melodies: Don't tell my Kazaa-using, "Free MP3 or Die" friends, but what I'd really like for the holidays is a subscription to Rhapsody, the online music service. You've probably heard lots of complaints about paid online music--the restrictions, the hassles, costs of downloading tunes, and so on. But here's what I like about Rhapsody: It works where I like to listen to music--at home and in the office, both with reliable Internet connections. And for $9.95 monthly--less than the cost of most new CDs--I have access to more music than I could buy in a lifetime (20,000 albums worth, according to Rhapsody).

Sure, the catalog has holes (the classical music selection is skimpy and--horrors--it has almost no Beatles or Elvis Costello). But the jazz collection is fantastic. And if your musical tastes are eclectic, Rhapsody is a great place to experiment; I didn't even know there was a musical style called Ambient House, much less that I would like it. Plus, I don't have to deal with time-consuming downloads, poor file quality, and the fear that my modem and I may be hauled into court by the Recording Industry Association of America. Okay, so it's not the Internet the way we all love it--free, untrammeled and unprofitable--but it works for me. --Edward N. Albro

IPod Who? If you want a great hard drive-based MP3 player, one that can cart around about 5000 songs to keep you amused during any workout or commute, ask Santa for the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen: I'm going to, and it won't put Santa in the poorhouse. At $350, the 20GB Zen costs about $150 less than the comparable media-darling IPod, and you don't have to shell out additional cash for a pesky FireWire card if USB 1.1 transfer speeds are good enough for you. (But speed demons take note: The Zen is FireWire-capable.) Plus, Creative offers a $50 rebate through at least December 31. Oh Santa, we could make beautiful music together! --Anne B. McDonald

Multimedia Marvels

Screening Room: I've been lusting for a home-theater projector that won't destroy my kids' college funds, and I've settled on Philips' LC6231, though it won't actually be on sale until January. I love this machine's quiet operation and outstanding imaging. Truth be told, movies shown on one of these beauties put to shame the low-end plasma displays that have been all the rage this winter, and the LC6231 is less expensive than most of them. Sadly, it will cost about $2500. But I can hope that Santa will deliver some checks this year, can't I? --Ramon G. McLeod

Burning Request: I'd like Sony's $349 multiformat DVD burner. With the DRU500a, I don't need to worry about which format will ultimately win the DVD wars--it handles four of the five major formats compatible with my living room DVD player. (The one it doesn't do, DVD-RAM, is best for data archiving, and can't be read by most DVD players and older drives anyway.)

The Sony drive is fast. It burns DVD-R at 4X and DVD-RW at 2X--that's twice the speed of older DVD-R/-RW drives. It also burns DVD+R and DVD+RW at 2.4X and handles CD-R/RW functions, too (at 24X and 10X, respectively). It's a must for anyone who wants to burn their own videos, transfer VHS tapes to a more durable and compact format, or back up data onto hefty 4.7GB discs. What's not to love? --Anush Yegyazarian

Duly Noted: With its beautiful 15.2-inch screen, recordable DVD drive, loads of great software, and light weight, the $2299 Apple PowerBook G4 would be the perfect gift for me. --Kalpana Narayamamurthi

Digital Timekeeper: To firmly establish my geek credentials, I'm asking Santa for the binary clock on the Think Geek Web site this year. The $20 battery-powered desktop timepiece displays hours, minutes, and seconds in binary format using a series of red LEDs. --Andrew Brandt

Eyes on Upgrades

Aw, Shoot: A Digital Camera! Since I've held off this long, I want a really nice 4-megapixel one--maybe the new Canon PowerShot G3. Or, if Santa's running late anyway, how about the Canon PowerShot S45 that's due out early next year? It's smaller, and I can wait. --Yardena Arar

Shoot, Again: It's the year of the digicam--according to all the pundits--so Santa can tuck one of the small and light but powerful models in my stocking. I'd be happy with the Olympus D-550 Zoom. At $399, this 3-megapixel model isn't even one of the really pricey ones, but it produces clean images with accurate colors, and provides the manual control options I want. Of course, this calls for a snazzy photo printer. Based on my colleagues' lab tests, I'm eyeing the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 7550, which seems full-featured for a $299 printer (even if its ink cartridges are a little pricey). Heck, Santa should throw in some spare ink cartridges and photo paper. --Peggy Watt

Gadget-Happy: So many gadgets rank on my list--and if Santa doesn't deliver, many will be charged to my credit card by year-end. High on the list is the $120 IGo Juice power adapter from Mobility Electronics. Its modular design permits use as both a standard AC power brick and an auto/air adapter.

Next, a new monitor to replace a CRT display that's laughably old (it came with my desktop PC eight years ago), sadly fuzzy, and a small 15 inches. The leading contender is the $750 Samsung 172T, a sleek 17-inch LCD with an attractive silver bezel.

Queued up behind that is a new cell phone. I'm torn here: I love the features and design of the $250 T-Mobile Sidekick, which combines phone and PDA functions with truly usable Web browsing and on-the-go AOL Instant Messenger and POP3 e-mail access. But the high-capacity battery on the $200 Sony Ericsson T68i is incredibly enticing. It's rated at 390 hours of standby time and over 700 minutes of talk time; plus, it has WAP 2.0 wireless Web browsing, multimedia messaging, and Bluetooth--so I can then buy a wireless headset that'll cost as much as the phone itself. --Melissa Perenson