Business-Worthy Consumer Tech Gifts

The team at BYTE had the unique challenge of finding the top business-worthy consumer tech gifts for the holidays. There are lots of top 10 lists out there, but our challenge was finding cool consumer stuff that will also work well in the enterprise. Of course, many consumer products can be brought into the enterprise--that's the raison d'etre for BYTE--but there aren't a lot of them that also make great gifts. We skipped the obvious--the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire--because we bet whoever wants those gadgets has them already. Our goal: gifts that would surprise, yet also function at work.

By day, the Asus Eee Transformer Prime is a button-down laptop and the envy of any board member. By night it's a sleek, sexy tablet when detached from its keyboard. The original iteration, which debuted in April, received mixed reviews due to the OS. Honeycomb is lame, so Asus installed Ice-Cream Sandwich on the Prime, and upgraded the chip to a quad core with 1GB of RAM. The Prime is surprisingly lightweight, has a tight fit and finish, and boasts a whopping 18-hour battery life when connected to the keyboard. With all that horsepower, the gaming is dazzling. It does a fairly decent spreadsheet as well. The tablet and keyboard are sold separately, $448.98 and $119.16, respectively.