We’ve all seen them. The geeky treasure hunters with their metal detecting gadgets, wandering around the beach or fields with their headphones on trying to detect the faintest sound that might make them rich. Come rain or shine they are out there, but do they look like they are having fun? Not to me they don’t. What they need is a change in tact or in this case, gadget. What I’m talking about is the Metal Detecting Dune Buggy.

That’s right, you heard me. A remote controlled car as a metal detector. How much more fun can you get than that. It stands at 11.5 inches x 9.5 inches x 6.5 inches and weighs a mere 2 lbs so it is easy to transport wherever you go. With its in-built metal detector it will pick up any iron based metal down to four inches below the surface. When it does find something, its red LED light will start flashing and the car will start beeping making sure you know, and everyone around you know, that you could soon be rich.

You can control the car within a range of 25 feet so you don’t need to do a lot of walking to do the searching. It runs on four AA batteries and a 9V battery and will last up to four hours of treasure hunting.

With the death of vinyl, DJs were faced with a dilemma. How were they to mix their songs at nightclubs? There were no gadgets or decks that could accommodate the new CD technology, so they hung on to their vinyls for as long as possible. Now the CD mixing technology is fairly common and one of the well known names in the business is releasing its next line of decks.

Numark have been around the DJing business for over 30 years and their latest offering features two models. They are the NX200 and NX400. Both tabletop CD turntables will feature a large scratch wheel for comfortable scratching and Numarks very own anti-shock buffered skip-protection technology to prevent any skips in the music from vibrations. There is seamless looping capability and you can create your own playlists with the single, continuous and programmable playback. If you move the crossfader on a connected compatible mixer, the fader start feature will kick the NX into life.

The extra features of the NX400 include the ability to play MP3, CDs and music from a USB flash drive. For those DJs that feel nostalgic for the vinyl days there is advanced braking for vinyl-style start-up and stopping and it also has a reverse mode. To access key points in a track there are three hot cue points for you to configure.

All in all, a comprehensive package for the professional.

Security is a must when going online. Your gadgets can be vulnerable to attacks if the security is poor or non existent. There are plenty of antivirus programs to help with this and the internet does have its own security to a degree.

A lot of laptops come with fingerprint sensors now so you don’t need a password to access it which gets stored on your machine and so is vulnerable to hacking. There are also USB devices that can help protect your passwords. It is possible to have numerous accounts online that require different passwords. These devices can store your passwords so you can disconnect it when they are not needed preventing anyone being able to hack them.

NetSecure Technologies have released a device that they say will keep your credit card details safe for when you shop online. The SmartSwipe is a USB credit card reader that scrambles your information before it gets to the computer. Usually your information gets scrambled over the internet, but still remains on your PC.

The other benefit of this gadget is that you don’t need to type in your credit card details. Just swipe it just like you do in a shop and the online store will pick up the details. It is all so simple.

It is currently retailing for around $100 in the US.

Our entertainment systems are becoming very technical now. So many different gadgets to feed our need for visual and audio stimulation it is hard, sometimes, to keep track of what needs to plug into what to be able to satisfy that need. There are switches that you can employ for ease of selecting the correct source, but there again it is another gadget cluttering up your living room. Why not combine your entertainment into one device and get rid of all of the clutter.

The Olevia HD Media Player can offer just that. Also known as the ZP-500, this media player can provide all of the entertainment stimulation you need. Via its HDMI 1.3 interface it can decode, playback and send a full 1080p video to your connected TV. It will support HD MPEG2, RMVB HD, MKV, HD AVC/H.264 movie and HD VC-1. As well as this you can stream from a connected portable hard drive or USB drive through the 2 USB ports.

Supported audio formats are iTune, MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, ASF, OGG amongst others. This device can also be connected to the network using the Ethernet port allowing you to browse the local files via your PC.

Control of the system is with the remote control which allows you to easily move through the intuitive menu and select the entertainment you want without any fuss.

The older generation of music lovers have collected different types of formats over the years and to keep up with the changing technology new gadgets have replaced old. To keep up with the new technology formats there have been different devices over the years to convert your tapes or LPs to an MP3 format. The trouble with this is that once converted you would normally get rid of your old formats and the convertor is never used again and if you wanted to keep your LP’s and tapes you would need multiple devices to play them on.

Now there is an all-in-one device that can play all formats held in a neat package negating the need for multiple devices. Teac have introduced us all to the LP-R550. It contains a turntable that supports 3 speeds, 33, 45 and 78 which covers all of my record collection, a tape player and recorder, a CD player and recorder which supports CD/CD-R/CD-RW discs and a PLL synthesized AM/FM stereo tuner. Coming in-built in the system are 3.5W x 2 channel speakers and it can all be controlled by the remote control.

If you still have your old formats sitting around somewhere and don’t want to get rid of them for sentimental reasons then this could be for you. However, at the moment it is only available in Japan and if it were to come over here you would need deep pockets.

Digital picture frames are 10 a penny lately and usually fail to grab my attention when the next one is announced. They started off as a novel way of displaying your photos without having to get them printed from your memory card. They then gradually turned into full blown multi-purpose gadgets giving you access to the internet and being able to play music and even videos, turning into a central hub for the home. So when a new one is released I quickly pass it by. However, one has caught my eye due to a neat feature.

The Sondata Shake-a-Pix incorporates technology that is found in a lot of gadgets these days. The picture frame has a 2.4 inch TFT screen and is said to be the world’s first digital photo frame to contain motion sensors. It utilises this feature by changing photos when you shake the frame.

The Shake-a-Pix is the size of a credit card and only 0.6 cm thick. It has 64 MB of memory allowing you to store up to 90 images in 320 x 240 pixel resolution. Coming with this gadget is a neck strap allowing you to have it on display at all times and it also comes with a USB cable so you can upload photo’s to the photo frame and to charge the battery.

When manufacturers decide on a design for a gadget they have to think about a target audience. With phones you would think that the audience was just someone who wanted to communicate with someone else while on the go. This, these days though, is only part of what phones are capable of.

Some manufacturers aim for an audience that likes to listen to music and so they build a phone that has good quality music playback and storage for the songs. Others will put an emphasis on the camera feature of the phone, incorporating as high a megapixel count as possible. So it comes a bit of a surprise when I saw the Seabright SB6309.

This dual SIM card phone is the first I’ve ever come across with an in-built cigarette lighter. It is not something that seems to be a natural fit for a mobile phone, but I suppose it makes some sense. Your phone is always with you and lighters are often forgotten or lost while you are out.

The phone itself comes with a 2.4 inch QVGA LCD screen, a 1.3 Megapixel camera, Bluetooth, MP3 and MP4 support, a FM radio and of course a gold cigarette lighter.

It could be a nice addition to your gadget library and just think, for the men out there, how it would look if a lady asked for a light and you obliged by using your phone. Cool!

While you are out running yourself fit, it is sometimes hard to get yourself motivated, especially when the nights are drawing in. This isn’t so much of a problem in the gym as there are burnt calorie indicators and miles run monitors to show you that something is happening to your body. Perception Digital Limited wants to change this with their Liv-Lite gadget.

This fitness aid has been designed with walkers and joggers in mind. It is small in size and can be attached to your sleeve where it is able to monitor heart rate, measure steps and play your music. With an in-built stop watch you will be able to keep a check on your exercise time and it will also tell you how much fat you have burnt. Other features include a software download that analyses your exercise data and an interface for Facebook.

Perception Digitals Executive Director, Jeff Chui, had this to say:

“Medical experts agree that everyone benefits from brisk walking. This means walking between 3 and 4 miles per hour or between 7,000 and 10,000 steps per day. Most people get bored with exercise; they need feedback and a way to measure their success.”

There is no indication yet of when this gadget will be available or what price it will be, but if you find it hard to keep yourself going, maybe this little device is all the motivation you will need.

Technology is advancing in visual entertainment to the degree that 3D technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. Glasses are still needed to enjoy the characters popping out of the screen, but there are predictions that these will not be needed within the next 5 years. Gadgets, therefore, will be following shortly after, or, in the case of Fujifilm’s new camera, now.

They are releasing a camera that is capable of taking 3D images and when they have been processed you can view them without the need for special glasses. This is possible by putting the image on a special 3D enabled digital photo frame or alternatively it can be printed using a special 3D printing process.

How the camera achieves these images is with the use of dual lenses that are spaced out in a similar way that our eyes are. However this technology won’t come cheaply. It will be a 10 megapixel camera and will sell for around $600. You may think that that is not too bad for new technology, but on top of that is the digital photo frame which is around $200 and each three dimensional print costs $5.

I don’t know if 3D will be the next big thing, but it has been tried a few times before only to fade away in the background. Let’s hope this time it stays around.