Each year tech companies will try and tell you what gadgets to get for Christmas by blabbing on about RIM, RAM and terrabytes. Yawn. And don’t even get us started on the pink and sparkly gifts of season’s past. But fear not –  hopefully no returns will be necessary if you write this year’s letter to Santa with a little help from Lady Geek. Whether you are looking to give or receive (or just receive…) we are bringing you our favourite gadgets that belong on everyone’s wishlists.

Stocking Stuffers

iStand

First up for a fun stocking stuffer, the iStand offers a way to prop up your mobile phone in the stylish manner it truly deserves. It also doubles up as a nice grip for when you’re sending out Boxing Day ‘thank you’ texts to everyone who got you something. Well everyone who didn’t buy you socks, anyway.

£4.49 at Lazybone

The first app I remember seeing was shown to me by a guy friend of mine, and it was the Wobble app. In case you don’t have the pleasure of familiarity with this app, it allows you to add “boob jiggle” to a photo of any woman of your choice. And we wonder why our research with YouGov (Source: The App Economy YouGov/Lady Geek 2010) has show women with smartphones were nearly twice as likely as men to have never downloaded a SINGLE app.

Quite remarkable when the same piece of research showed that more women than men bought smartphones in the last 6 months.  So women are buying smartphones but are not buying apps for 2 main problems.  One like me, women perceive a lot of the apps are not relevant to their lives such as iFart, i Burp and so on.  The second is that there is just too much choice out there. Who needs 200,000 apps- most women want a small selection of apps that make a difference to their lives.

And that is exactly the ambition and purpose of the brilliant IdeasProject “Apps to Empower Women” Challenge run by Nokia. The competition asked for submissions of app ideas that would make a real, practical difference to women’s work, education and leisure. The top app chosen in the challenge will be developed by a team of women software developers.

Honours went to Mobile Women African Crafters by Atim Oton, Easy App for Elderly Women by JoJa Dhara and Trigger Free by Jenny Evgenia. Mobile Women African Crafters would be an app  that creates and increases sustainable income for local women crafters in Kano, Nigeria who stay at home and work. The idea is an online space for crafters to share and sell their crafts via Mobile phones. The Easy App for Elderly Women would help elderly women navigate their way through various social networking and communication tools to help them stay in contact with their friends and family. Trigger Free would allow survivors of sexual violence to identify media that can trigger post-traumatic stress. Allowing users to add media to a database, rate them and help other survivors enjoy trigger-free leisure.

The winner was Woman’s Personal Private Market Place by Rustam Sengupta. Often women, especially living in the rural areas of emerging markets do not have access to personal care products such as contraceptives, or the means to purchase them from traditional sellers. The app will have a catalogue of such products and allow the process to be as discrete and comfortable as possible. Now that is what I call a real app.

These ideas show the force for good in innovative technology like apps. Yes we can download apps to get the weather or play a game, but its amazing to see how apps are transforming how women gain access to everything from health services to banking, and employment opportunities to educational tools. The mWomen Programme is an important component of this, and addresses key barriers to women’s access to mobile phones. The appetite for empowering apps is a hunger to feed, and there are inspiring women making it happen.

Written by Sarah Fink from Lady Geek TV.

The judges for the Apps to Empower Women Challenge were Mitchell Baker, Abigail Disney, Libby Leffler, Elizabeth Varley, Angelique Mannella and Belinda Parmar.

Belinda Parmar is the founder of Lady Geek TV. Please join the Lady Geek campaign to end the stereotypes and cliches towards women in tech and Like us on Facebook

After the disappointing N97 it was all to easy to dismiss Nokia as a fading star of mobile phone design. The flagship which failed to float was the perfect excuse for a whole horde of doomsayers to predict the end of the once-greatest mobile company. A common quip was that unless Nokia were to pull off something entirely miraculous it would be “the end”. Fortunately the N900 is the miracle we had all hoped for, a truly remarkable combination of new software and hardware.

It’s hard to disentangle all the novelty in this new phone: Not only is it the first of a brand new form-factor (the sliding landscape keyboard-phone), but it’s also the first phone in Nokia’s huge portfolio to feature Maemo, an operating system entirely new to the world of phones. That’s not to say that Maemo is new: It’s been on the market since 2006 but only on Nokia’s ultra-niche tablet computers.

First of all, lets deal with the easy stuff- the hardware: Nokia vastly simplified the slider mechanism compared to the N97. Instead of the elaborate slide and tilt, this keyboard simply slides out from behind the screen. While it doesn’t look so impressive it makes for a device which is both more comfortable and rugged. The new keyboard is slightly wider than the N97s since they ditched the somewhat useless D-pad. I guess they figured out that users don’t actually need a d-pad and a touch-screen if the touch screen is good enough.

Ony of my big criticisms of the N97 was its’ insensitive touch screen (I called it a “punch screen“). At the time I put this down to the fact that Nokia had chosen the older “resistive” technology rather than the more trendy “capacitive” screens used by the iPhone and most android devices. The N900 has not switched to capacitative, and yet the screen seems a great deal more responsive. I’ve not yet encountered the frequent false-clicks of the older model. Nokia claim that the advantage of a resistive screen is that you can be more precise. This is why the N900 has a concealed stylus which slides out of the front. It’s not actually possible to use a stylus on a capacitative screen, so Nokia clearly see this as giving their customers wider choices.

The other major criticism of the N97 was that it seemed sluggish compared to the high-end phones: Once again this has seems to have been fixed. Even while multitasking the N900 seems to have the processing power to stay lively and responsive. This is no doubt a consequence of the shift to Nokia’s next generation operating system. Maemo is the phone’s biggest new feature: It’s an operating system unlike anything I’ve seen before on a mobile, but oddly similar to almost everything I’ve used on my desktop.

I dont want to give the impression that it was entirely perfect:

The biggest problem with Maemo today is a complete lack of commercial apps. None of the official Google Apps (e.g. Mail, Maps) have been ported to Maemo. It also lacks some of my favourites such as Spotify, BBC iPlayer and Last.fm. There’s no technical reason to doubt that these applications will eventually be ported to Maemo, however early adopters might need to beware that they might have to do without their favourite apps.

As compensation for the lack of apps, the web-browser is really good: Good enough (for example) to use the web-versions of Twitter, and BBC iPlayer. The built in multimedia conceals some pleasant surprises, such as the fact that that the it can handle high-definition DivX movie files and Ogg audio files. No other device I can think of can play all of these non-commerical formats despite the fact that they are hugely popular in the free-software world.

So is the N900 the “iPhone Killer” that everybody’s been pining for? No, and thankfully not. I think this product represents an entirely new territory for the mobile phone industry. Rather than replicate Apple’s model of a tightly controlled environment, Nokia are emphasizing openness by borrowing a strategy which has worked so well for the open-source movement. This is the most open mobile platform on the market today, and I feel that proposition alone will draw in the “core” of developers who will in turn deliver the novel applications which will usher in a wider audience.

In summary, the N900 is intuitive, responsive and a joy to use.  A true star in the Nokia family.

I thought I am overdoing it a bit by carrying around two phones. One smart phone, in my case a BlackBerry 8820 which I got from work, and my private phone. However I do not seem to be such a minority as I thought. A report by Rubicon Consulting shows that 36.4% of iPhone users have a second phone with them. Reading the comments of a review which looked at this phenomenon, it seems that many people carry two phones. Most of them are just like me because they have one for work use and one for personal use.

The workphone is usually a smart phone like a Blackberry. Like Belinda, I was sent a Nokia E65 for review purposes. Like her I am a bit disappointed by the device. While the N-Series got a lot of coverage including a blog, the E-Series is still uncharted territory. The E-Series is marketed as a Nokia for business needs. It is seen as a phone where substance meets style. It comes in a range of colours such as white (what I was given), red, pink, mocca, purple and black.

How does the E65 do in relation to my BlackBerry 8800? The E65 is a slider and although overall smaller it appears rather bulky and heavy. The overall appearance is almost a bit tacky in contrast to my BlackBerry. The 8800 is larger but slimmer and I really appreciate the qwerty keyboard which makes answering emails and messages much easier. The E65 is a bit of a let down in this respect as a smart phone without qwerty seems to defeat the objective. At least for me. However my BlackBerry lacks a camera and I was really impressed by the quality of the two mega pixel camera the E65 has. Overall, I prefer my BlackBerry due to ease of use with typing and also it takes less space in my handbag.

So the E65 maybe as a second phone? For most people it would probably be a good second phone and a good entry point into the smart phone area. However I am less convinced by this because the E65 feels quiet heavy. It also does not look very stylish and if you have a private phone you want to have something that is a good accessory.

Although the E65 is not a bad phone, it does not fit into my lifestyle. Neither as a business phone nor as a private phone. A true innovation would be to make the two phone syndrome obsolete. Given that lots of people fill their pockets with phones and despite of the fact that big handbags are in fashion for women, it seems like a waste to carry around two phones and other electronic gadgets like an iPod. Convergence might mean that future smart phones are truly smart and include different profiles for the same user such as one for work and one for private use. At least it would de-clutter handbags.