1. Back To School Part 3

It won't be long now. The Back to School Monster is breathing down all our necks. This time we start with 11 brand new and most cool gizmos for returning students and their teachers [Back to School Part 3]. Then we reprise the 23 products featured in the first and second parts of this year's Back to School Guide [Back to School Part 2 and Back to School Part 1]. Use the drop down menu at the end of each page to find the products that interest you.

Introduction

There's absolutely no doubt about it any more: school will be starting soon. The local high school has started its two-a-day workouts for the football team, and I can see those poor aspiring jocks sweltering away in the heat and humidity both morning and evening. While not everybody who's returning to the halls of academe needs to jump so many hurdles to get through the door, all will do better if equipped with some goodies and gadgets to ease the transition, and to help tackle those looming mountains of schoolwork.

In this third and final installment of our three-part Back to School Buyer's Guide, there's plenty of interesting stuff with which you might gift some lucky person. We kick off this collection with a triumvirate of compact storage devices, including two memory card devices and a compact, powerful external notebook drive. Next, we present a very nice nylon messenger bag that should ease the style burden, if not the weight, of schlepping books and gear to and from the classroom.

The absolute must-have gadget for this fall is next - namely, the Apple iPhone. After that, we suggest a nice-sized and affordable digital picture frame, followed by a snazzy graphing calculator that can handle (and depict) all kinds of numerical data. A plush lap pad for notebook PCs trails close behind, along with two very nice Bluetooth headsets: one that gives great music, and another that excels at phone work. We close out this final assortment with some flashcard decks designed to help students prep for quizzes and exams. What more could those back-to-schoolers want, anyway?

The three storage devices we cover include an interesting OCZ offering called the Trifecta, which provides a dock for microSD and SD memory cards, along with 1 or 2 GB of built-in Flash RAM. There's also the Thermaltake Silver River Duo, a portable 3.5" drive enclosure that supports IDE and SATA hard disks, and can connect via USB 2.0 or eSATA, plus the ever-so-snazzy 8 GB Corsair Flash Voyager. The Solo NY10 nylon messenger bag offers a stylish and capacious case in which to carry some or all of this stuff.

The Apple iPhone is expensive and has some quirks, but still promises to reinvent the way we use personal information and entertainment - so expense be hanged, it's still worth pondering. The Westinghouse DPF 1411 is a 14.1" digital picture frame that shows both moving and still images, on a screen that would do a notebook PC proud. The Casio FX-7400GPlus graphing calculator is an affordable but powerful graphing calculator that the company designed to accommodate National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) requirements, and is thus ideal for math students at all levels.

The student lifestyle will get great support from the Belkin CushTop, a special padded notebook cushion designed for notebook PC use on the lap, the sofa, or the floor - all popular locations for busy students. The Plantronics Pulsar 260 offers great stereo sound via Bluetooth, whereas the Sennheiser BW900 excels at handling phone conversations. Busy students can use one to play a quality soundtrack for their peripatetic perambulations, or the other if they're always busy on the phone.

The last item in this back to school offering has genuine academic pretensions, if not value. It's a subscriber service that delivers interactive digital flashcards for exam or subject review on a cellphone. Students can sign up for flashcard decks for the SAT and GRE exams, lots of modern languages, a wide range of academic subjects and topics, and all kinds of professional training from firefighting to law enforcement.

So much for the introduction. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to dig into the descriptions of all eleven items included in this Buyer's Guide installment!

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