The Little Printer Courtesy of Berg Cloud

Well this is awkward. Not awkward like if your friend’s mom found you in her closet, naked, with a sheep and a giant bottle of hot sauce. Not like that.

What Techeye has in mind isn’t in the Bible under “Reasons Gomorrah Got the Holy Slap Down.” We’re referring to the awkward timing of this column. On the one hand, it’s too close to Christmas to be of much use as gift inspiration, unless you’re like us, procrastinating until the last minute then running around for presents like a kid who’s been freebasing chocolate.

On the other hand, there’s never been a particularly strong demand for “New Year’s Eve” gadget guides. And January’s Consumer Electronics Show is distant enough that the media blitz has not yet begun and fresh info on 2012’s coolest new toys is difficult to come by.

So here’s the deal: most of the items here are left over from previous columns. They’re things which somehow didn’t fit and, anyway, you can’t buy yet. Not exactly the dregs of Tech Eye, but not exactly not the dregs either.

Let’s start with the Little Printer from BERG Cloud (bergcloud.com), a picture of which has been sitting on our computer desktop for weeks, staring creepily out at us and generally plaguing our dreams until it came down to a choice: write about the damned thing or hack the computer to death with an axe. The former solution seemed less costly.

Its maker describes the Little Printer thusly: “It’s like having your own printing press, newspaper and a dog to fetch it for you, all in your front room.” We’ll add a couple of other descriptors: quirky, cute, inedible, not extremely useful. It can print birthday reminders, daily puzzles, “publications” (specialized RSS streams, basically), to-do lists and so on. It might make a nice analog-y source of info for technophobes, except that you need a degree of technical proficiency to set it up. And the average person able to set up a Little Printer is presumably happy enough using, say, a smartphone.

Perhaps we’re being hasty. The device is still in the alpha testing phase, with the beta phase and pre-orders scheduled to begin in 2012. Plenty of time left to come up with a raison d’źtre. Or not.

Then there’s the T1132N, which sounds like the love-child of a Terminator robot and Robert Duvall (in George Lucas’ first film, of course). Sadly, it’s not quite that awesome.

Courtesy of Gigabyte

The T1132N is actually a hybrid notebook/tablet computer from Gigabyte (gigabyte.com), a company which made its name with motherboards for gaming computers but has quietly branched into more complicated products. The firm’s latest boasts an Intel Core i5-2467M processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GT520M 1GB graphics card and an 11.6-inch touchscreen. There’s also an “exclusive rotatable docking station” for when your T1132N just wants to sit and spin.

As it hasn’t hit the market yet and Gigabyte is keeping quiet, there’s no pricing info yet. But somewhere between $1,200 and the price of a homicidal robot is probably a good guess.

Speaking of which, the last item on Techeye’s agenda represents the latest step in Man’s quest to create artificial life which will some day arrive at the perfectly rational decision that the extinction of Man is in everyone’s best interest. Even so, the Nao Next Gen is so adorable that it’s hard to be mad at it. In fact, we want one right Nao.

The Nao Next Gen Courtesy of Aldebaran Robotics

Sorry, that was lame. Anyway, there’s little chance of us getting our grubby, freebased-chocolate-covered hands on one. The Nao Next Gen is only for geeky types at the moment – to get one you have to join Aldebaran’s Developer Program, which involves paying a couple thousand dollars, presumably making some kind of intellectual contribution and generally suckling at the teat of nerdliness.

Unfortunately Techeye is financially and intellectually destitute, and too out of shape to impress anyone with an overcompensatingly heroic feat of teat-sucklage. Which is a shame, because the Nao Next Gen is pretty cool. It stands 23-inches tall, is equipped with an Intel Atom 1.6ghz CPU and has a vocal-recognition program called Nuance which Aldebaran seems quite proud of.

There’s also “fall manager” software, which helps protect Nao’s sensitive bits when it falls, but most exciting, in our opinion, is the “fist-bump” functionality. This is the first time we’ve ever seen anybody look less natural at the fist bump than us.

And that, Dear Readers, is the kind of awkward which Techeye can appreciate.

Ever spent some quality time in your friend’s mom’s closet? Let us know: techeye.wbj@gmail.com