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.

Wristwatches are so five minutes ago. These days, we might not have a lot of time, but it's displayed everywhere, including the screen you're looking at now. So why give anyone a watch? Sony Ericsson has the answer. Use the Sony Ericsson LiveView to deliver music, Facebook, tweets, texts, RSS feeds, calls, calendar items, even a "find your phone" feature--and of course the date and time. The LiveView is a 128-pixel-by-128-pixel OLED screen with two buttons and a touchscreen that provide limited control of your mobile phone via Bluetooth.