Giving Gadget Gifts, Take the Pain Out of Shopping for Dad

Is shopping for your father a long, painful process? Do you find yourself sweating every time Fathers Day, Christmas or your dad's birthday arrives?

Why not get him an electronic gadget? What else has as much guy appeal yet can serve so many diverse functions?

The range of cool gadgets on the market today is incredible. It doesn't matter if your father is interested in the outdoors, automotive restoration and maintenance, computers, travel, photography or arts and crafts there's sure to be a gadget available for him.

In fact, the latest gadgets make popular presents. Gadget gifts are the third most likely to be purchased after CDs and clothes on fathers day in the US according to the National Retailers Association.

So what makes gadget gifts so popular?

When considering which gift to get it is very difficult to get past the novelty factor of new gadgets. This novelty factor is so strong that it is hard for gifts like clothing or photo frames to compare.

New electronic gadgets, particularly strange gadgets or unusual cool gadgets, also create conversations and give fathers something to talk about with friends or colleagues. When was the last time you heard your father talk about his latest shirt?

Gadgets also appeal to men particularly because of their ability to create something or solve problems. It is this benefit that perhaps adds to the attraction of gadgets so much that there is a wide range of gadgets for men.

Don't just get bland socks or a generic CD for your father on his birthday or Fathers Day. Watch his face light up with joy by getting him some cool new gadgets.

Christmas Shopper Poll - The Favorite Gadgets...

In our latest popularity poll, we didn't ask what the most useful gadgets were. Or the highest quality, or the most expensive, or the cheapest. No, our sole metric was "How much do you just love the crazy thing?" And in our informal office poll, this is what we came up with:

1. Music players. Number one with a bullet, out way ahead of number two. Apparently the whole human race was waiting to have a device the size of a pack of mints that stored gigabytes of MP3s, so it could get out and boogie in the street. 80-year-old grandmas and 5-year-old kids love it! Even the dog loves it! And it's so much more convenient than the 10,000 other methods of portable music that came before it. After all, if you remember the 1980s when people carried refrigerator-sized boom-boxes around just to have music with them, you realize just how important music is to people.

2. Handheld video games. These, too, have been popular since we first came out with the concept. Electronic handheld games also go back to the 1980s. (Where's Merlin now?) (And where's that Nintendo GameBoy?) Now that handheld video games have taken several leaps in graphics and sound quality as well as game depth, they're more indispensable than ever.

3. GPS. We'll all be telling our grandkids that in the old days we had to use actual paper maps to find our way around. And you'd have to follow a grid system from an index of streets on the back, and read a legend where a purple line meant a bike path and a dotted yellow line meant a road they haven't built yet! And you'd have to unfold these things and spread them out all over the car... You might as well try to make them believe that you navigated the ocean with an astrolabe and compass.

4. Speakers. Along with music players, it was widely agreed that the highest quality speaker or headphone contributed greatly to the pleasure. Bad, low-quality speakers with tinny sounds and scratchy static are, however, the most hated device.

5. Texters. Strangely, text messaging is beating out mobile phones for popularity. It seems that phone shave been around for so long, that everybody just takes them for granted. Texters, on the other hand, keep our thumbs busy ticking out dozens of little telegrams daily. It's never too noisy to read a text message, you don't worry as much about reception, and you're not as tempted to use one while driving. United States president Barrack Obama said it best when he said he'd never part with his Blackberry, so the White House would just have to change the telecommunications infrastructure to accommodate him. Except we're sure his exact quote was "I H4V 2 UZ BLKBRY! U F1T 1T N2 YR SYSTM!"