Courtesy of Leapfrog

Writing this column without the aid of a fermented, brewed or distilled beverage is kind of like walking to the South Pole without pants on – extremely difficult and guaranteed to shrivel one’s, uh, sense of adventure.

Nevertheless, Techeye did a fair impression of a bare-bottomed Ernest Shackleton last week, after we discovered our refrigerator entirely devoid of beer. That wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem, except our cash-flow situation was suffering a terrible case of existential angst and our liquor cabinet has stood empty since Grandma Techeye died. Her will stipulated that she was to be buried with 12 bottles of white lightning – “one for each disappointing, stenchy fleshsack of a grandchild” – and none of the other fleshsacks was willing to sacrifice their booze.

Long story short, this article was written under the crushing weight  of sobriety.

It proved a real challenge too. We’re so used to seeing double that we can barely hit the right letters on the keyboard when there’s only one of each.

Indeed, we stumbled upon this week’s gadgets through pure accident. Our attempt to search for “gallant beer tin,” for example, somehow turned into “learning tablet, which led us to the LeapPad learning tablet from educational toymaker LeapFrog (www.leapfrog.com). Go figure.

Anyway, the LeapPad is a simple tablet computer designed with kids in mind, something which any parent with a smartphone or tablet can appreciate. Snot-covered fingers pounding on the touchscreen? Peanut butter smears? Repeated “accidental” drops? The LeapPad takes these in stride.

Courtesy of IHelicopter

Therein lies the rub, though. While the device itself is relatively affordable ($99 on Amazon), the apps are not. The cheapest are around $6, with the most expensive almost $30. A price point like that is rather hard to explain (or excuse) in today’s market. There are other niggles too, but the bottom line is this – if you can handle the inflated app
prices, the LeapPad is a good hands-on toy for the young learners in your life.

Techeye found one other gadget while in the throes of temperance, something that’s guaranteed to drive you up a wall – the iW500, an “iPhone-controlled wall climbing car.” This product, marketed by iHelicopter (www.ihelicopters.net), “works by using the opposite principle of the hovercraft and creates a vacuum between itself and the wall or ceiling.” In other words, it’s a hoovercraft.

Like other remote-controlled vehicles these days, battery time is a let down – every 10 minutes of action-packed wall racing is followed by 30 minutes of action-unpacked
battery charging.

The upside is that the price won’t make a sucker out of you. The iW500 costs $60 and iHelicopter will ship it anywhere in the world at no additional cost, “from the Arctic to the South Pole.”

That’s great news for anyone dumb brave enough to trek through Antarctica without undies – even if your southern hemisphere freezes, you’ll still have something to play with.