Ho-ho-ho, people! Time to rack your brains to come up with cool gifts for the tech nuts in your life.
Most “holiday tech gift idea†lists are full of suggestions like “iPod Touch, $300†or “Surface tablet, $500.†Really? Hundreds of dollars? Beyond your parent/child/love interest, how many people on your list really get that kind of outlay?
What the world really needs are cheap gifts that real-world people can give to real-world friends, bosses, employees and family members. Well, stand back: Today is the first entry in the first week of the first year of a new feature: David Pogue's 12 Gadgets of Christmas. One offbeat tech gift idea a day - and nothing over $100.
On the first day of gadgets, today's entry: Monopoly Zapped.
We all know and love Monopoly; it's been breeding real-estate lust since 1904. But for generations, we also all know what's been slowing down the game: that gol-durned phony cash. Counting. Adding. Making change. Collecting it into little piles. Arguing over whether the transaction is complete.
Not anymore. For $25, Hasbro is happy to sell you the Zapped edition of Monopoly. There is no paper money in this game. You put your iPhone or iPad in the middle of the board - and each player gets, I kid thee not, a fake credit card.
You pay or collect money from the bank electronically, just by placing your card briefly on the touch screen.
As a bonus, the Community Chest and Chance cards require you to play mini-games on the touch screen, sometimes against your opponents - a handy way to spice up the proceedings.
The free app takes some figuring out, and it doesn't work on the iPad Mini. The game board is just straight-ahead cardboard; it feels a little cheap compared with the real board game's board. And, of course, the app tracks all of your financial holdings for you - your young ones are deprived of whatever math practice the traditional Monopoly game might have afforded them.
But otherwise, this is the same old game, with cool-looking, updated game pieces and slick animation that show money flying between the two parties who have just, you know, transacted. If your lucky recipient already owns an iPhone or iPad, this is one tech gift that won't wind up in the back of the junk drawer.
