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Go go gadgets

It’s official. The Sony PS3 (www.playb3yond.com) hit the stores on Thursday, Nov. 17, and by all accounts is completely sold out until at least two months after Christmas.
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It’s official. The Sony PS3 (www.playb3yond.com) hit the stores on Thursday, Nov. 17, and by all accounts is completely sold out until at least two months after Christmas. It also turns out that most of the people you saw waiting in line to purchase the console were opportunists who turned around and sold them on eBay for an average of $1,400 U.S. — 13,000 consoles sold so far for almost three times the sticker price.

The Nintendo Wii (http://wii.nintento.com) launched on Saturday with similar fanfare, and while Nintendo can guarantee more units than Sony for Christmas it’s still going to be a hard console to get your hands on. Think Furby and Tickle Me Elmo, with 50 per cent less department store trampling.

Rounding out the gadget extravaganza was the Nov. 14 release of the Microsoft Zune (www.zune.net), which is expected to compete directly with iPod but will be lucky to beat out any of the half dozen companies that are vying for the 18 per cent market share that doesn’t yet belong to Apple (www.apple.com). Reviews for the Zune have generally been harsh, citing everything from buggy software, lack of online video and music content, an oddball points-based song purchasing system, the limited wireless capability, and so on, but you have to remember that this is Microsoft. No company has deeper pockets, the cross-platform capability, or the built-in customer base that Microsoft commands, and the company does listen to its customers from one product generation to the next. Look at the leap from Xbox to the Xbox 360.

For the customer on a fixed budget, or the kid who has to combine birthdays and Christmases to get big ticket items, what to get this Christmas is a difficult decision. The Xbox 360 (www.xbox.com) has been out for a year, is slightly cheaper than the PS3 (once you load up with accessories) and already has a massive library of games including all the top PC titles.

But you have to give a slight hardware edge to PS3 by virtue of the fact that it’s also a Blu-ray disk player and has built in wireless (both expensive Xbox 360 add-ons) and free online gaming. There’s also the fact that Sony has too much riding on the PS3 to allow it to fail while gaming remains a small and so far unprofitable part of Microsoft’s business spectrum.

Nintendo Wii is the cheapest game system by far, but the first version to hit the stores doesn’t even offer DVD playback. I sold my wife on the PS2 by virtue of the fact that it can double as a DVD player, and would find it hard to justify buying a system at any price that actually has less capability than the console I bought four years ago.

Zune competes on price with the iPod music and video player, which I’m also in the market for, but aside from a larger screen (relatively speaking), FM radio, and the ability to subscribe to unlimited music instead of buying songs individually, I’d probably feel more comfortably buying the “Zune II” by light of the fact that no tech company gets anything perfect the first generation. I’ll wait until they work out all the bugs.

Only one thing’s for certain this Christmas — I’m not sure enough about any one technology as expensive as these to buy in. And I doubt I’m the only one feeling that way.

Let that be a lesson to technology companies who save their biggest releases for the mid-November rush, giving you just five weeks in the busiest, most expensive season of the year to make what is for most families a major purchasing decision — providing you can find a store that has your gadget in stock in the first place.

Smart people buy their skis in the spring, their bikes in the fall, and their high tech a minimum of three to six months after it is released and all the reviews are in.

To help you make your decision, check out reviews online at www.cnet.com.

Canada’s paper trail

The American electronic voting experiment is a huge failure so far, with questionable results now from two federal elections, several local elections, and even primary elections that are held to choose candidates for the same political party.

The last election was no exception, with widespread reports of software failures, touch screen alignment issues, and mysterious “undervotes” — incomplete ballots where people would vote for state Congress and Senate positions, but inexplicably did not vote for federal congress or senate.

The most serious case was in — surprise, surprise — Florida, the state made famous for its dangling chads in the 2000 presidential election (which Al Gore won, however you recount the votes). In the 2006 mid-term election, one Florida congressional seat has an estimated 18,000 undervotes, and there’s no paper trail to speak of — which is kind of important when the margin of votes is just 400.

The companies that make the voting machines claim they work well, that problems were rare and mainly attributable to human error. Don’t believe them.

For more on what might have gone wrong in 2006, check out www.blackboxvoting.com .

In Canada we don’t use electronic voting in our federal elections, but we do use devices like optical scanners for municipal elections. Predictably, several municipal elections have been plagued by inaccurate numbers and unreliable results, forcing a manual recount of all ballots passed through the optical scanners. Quebec’s last municipal election was a disaster.

There is also growing pressure to use e-voting technology in provincial and federal elections in the future, which Elections Canada has so far resisted. For more on the future of electronic voting in Canada, and the campaign to prevent the switch, visit http://papervotecanada.blogspot.com.