Midrange gifts for the widget guru

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If you are affairs a smartphone or MP3 amateur this season, here's an advantage you apparently haven't considered: customized, fine-art-quality engraving. Joe Mansfield will bite any architecture you wish (or appear up with one to your specs) on iPods, cellphones, laptops and any added analogously sized tech accessory (prices ambit from $35 to $150). If you or your admired one is so aberrant you crave the antimatter of geekdom, Joe would be captivated to custom-engrave your Dutch-made, ecologically actual accomplished amber iPod case (80 euros, or about $102 at accepted barter rates).

There is one new and frightfully cute little gizmo this season that seems extraordinarily well-timed and well-positioned: the sub-$100 Peek ($79.95), a hand-held e-mail device aimed at those who don't have an iPhone or a BlackBerry and don't want one (or at any rate don't want to pay a grand a year for service). Painless to set up and easy to navigate even for the non-tech-savvy set, Peek is a triumph of design simplicity. It sends and receives flawlessly using most flavors of personal e-mail accounts, including GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the like, along with accounts from most major Internet providers. There are limitations: At least for now, it won't support most kinds of corporate e-mail addresses, it can handle no more than three separate accounts, and it dumps everything into one in box. But there are good reasons why Oprah, Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal have recently championed Peek: With service at $19.95 a month (via cellphone networks), it puts portable e-mail within the realistic range of many students, seniors, teachers, stay-at-home parents and lower-income folks for whom it previously seemed inconceivable.

― Andrew O'Hehir