Older, Cheaper Gadgets Make Great Gifts

A bunch of older gadgets—read: last year's models—"work fantastically well yet have been largely forgotten," Farhad Manjoo writes on Slate. What's more, they're relatively cheap, and perfect for the penny-pinching holiday shopper. A sampling:

• Kindle 1: The design is a bit "off-putting," and the device holds 200 titles compared with 1,500 for the latest version, but hey, it works. And it's less than $160, not $259.

• "Slightly old Apple products:" The pace of innovation at the company sure is remarkable, but even Steve Jobs can't do that much in a year. The regular old iPhone 3G is only a "bit" slower than the 3GS, and half the price.
• A Flip camera: The Mino HD is down to $160 from $230 last year, and its 4GB of space still features the same "wonderfully intuitive interface."
• WowWee Rovio: If you must have a "Web cam with wheels" controlled remotely from anywhere in the world, the price is right, down to to $209 from $300. And the firm has fixed some reported bugs with firmware updates.

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(More iPhone 3G stories.)