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By Samantha Schoech
Samantha Schoech is a writer focusing on gifts. She spends her time finding things that combine quality, beauty, usefulness, and delight.
Technology is just a part of life. We take photos with our smartphones, use GPS to track our pets, and, well, struggle to keep up with the latest charging cords. When it’s working well, technology can make our lives easier and simply more fun.
Whether the person you’re buying for is a hardcore early adopter or a quasi-Luddite who can’t get the printer working, we’ve got handy, helpful, and delightful gift ideas, including a portable projector, a stylish speaker, and a charging station for three devices.
If you’re looking for even more best-in-class tech picks, head over to our coverage on Wirecutter-recommended electronics, gaming, and smart-home devices, all tested by our expert tech and smart-home teams.
Both extra cute and functional, this rechargeable miniature TV has 8 GB of storage (enough for about 10 hours of videos) and comes with a teeny working remote.
Big-screen TVs, of course, are terrific for watching sports and action movies, but this teeny, 1.4-inch screen is way more adorable. Writer Haley Perry gave her partner a TinyTV 2 last year and writes, “When he got it, he freaked out and brought it to show off at his family’s Christmas right after.” This vintage-style TV comes preloaded with a few basic videos, including an infinite loop of a crackling fireplace. But your tech-loving recipient can replace those with their own MP4 files, using TinyCircuits’ desktop app, or they can stream them with a USB-C cable (not included). The settings can be adjusted using the mini control knobs (remember those?) or the itty-bitty working remote, and the TV can play for about two hours per charge.
This 1080p LED projector has a fun, capsule-shaped design with a rotatable stand, Google TV, and a built-in battery. But it falls short of our top pick in performance.
May be out of stock
For anyone who loves an outdoor movie night or would adore a wall-size screening of KPop Demon Hunters (a slumber-party win), our runner-up mini-projector pick is a party in a box. The 1080p LED projector runs Google TV, and in our testing the built-in battery ran for more than 2.5 hours at 50% brightness. The rotatable stand makes it easy to raise or lower the image height as needed. In addition to its streaming and projecting capabilities, this projector has a few other tricks up its sleeve: colored lights that pulse when the projector is used as a Bluetooth speaker, plus a sunset filter to turn every hour into golden hour. The remote is backlit, and the package includes a second, smaller remote with a lanyard.
These vibrant, quirky panel lights offer a huge variety of color-changing options and support all of the major smart-home platforms.
Perhaps your electronics- and gadget-loving giftee gets bored with regular wall art that just, well, hangs there. Enter this fully 21st-century solution — triangular, smart LED lights that change color, react to audio with pulses, and create patterns of varied light. In other words, they help get the party started. The individual NanoLeaf Shapes stick to the wall with the included mounting tape, and they can be arranged in any design or configuration. The box comes with seven triangular light panels, and there are many different expansion packs that can be purchased separately for larger designs. The smart light panels work with Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings, and they come with a remote but can also be controlled with the app or voice commands via a Bluetooth speaker. With enough pieces, someone with an artistic vision could create a light-up Yellow Brick Road (or a Brick Road in any of the virtually endless color options) running across an entire wall.
This Bluetooth speaker has a big, full sound that our panelists loved, with a minimalist but stylish design. But it is larger and has fewer features than our top pick.
May be out of stock
May be out of stock
Good tech doesn’t have to look techie. The Morel Högtalare Bluetooth speaker is a perfect example of what can happen when designers hide good tech behind great design. Concealed inside the sleek box (which comes in four color options and is about the size of a large cake box), there’s a 6-inch woofer with heart-thumping bass output, plus two of the same type of fabric dome tweeters you’d find in many high-end speakers. The Morel Högtalare provides an even, natural sound that our audio specialists deem worthy of everything from SZA to Luke Combs to Mozart, but there’s no optional app with EQ controls to fine-tune the sound.
This sleek ring provides highly accurate heart-rate monitoring and gives the user solid information on their sleep cycles. But it’s more expensive than many other sleep and fitness trackers, and at times it confuses inactivity with sleep.
The Oura Ring 4 is for anyone who wants to keep track of all their health stats all the time. It looks and wears like a sleek piece of jewelry, but it keeps tabs on way more than just steps and sleep. Among other things, it can tell the wearer their heart-rate variability, blood-oxygen rate, and body temperature. From those pieces of data, it assigns three daily scores in its accompanying app: one for sleep, one for activity, and one for readiness (how prepared the user is for the day based on the previous day’s activity and sleep). People use it to track their menstrual cycles and fertility windows, and the new “Symptom Radar” can detect changes in the body that indicate an oncoming illness long before the user starts sniffling. If the user isn’t meeting their health goals, the app gently suggests ways to increase activity, sleep, and relaxation. The Oura is available in silver, black, matte black, stealth, gold, and rose gold and a huge range of ring sizes. But it’s expensive and requires a $6-per-month app subscription, and it does make some mistakes, such as calculating lying on your back doing Wordle as sleep.
This speaker is small enough to fit in a pocket, yet it still sounds good. It doesn’t really have any bass, though, and the battery life is short.
The ultra-compact JBL Go 4 Bluetooth Speaker is one of our recommendations for Bluetooth speakers. Despite its diminutive size (3 by 4 inches), it produces satisfying and full sound, plus it’s dust- and water-proof. It has USB-C charging and a battery life of about five hours in standard mode, and it comes in plenty of jazzy colors, including blue, pink, and red. It weighs about as much as a smartphone, so it’s easy to carry around in a tote or backpack.
The easy-to-set-up, rock-shaped Bluetooth speaker is great for casual outdoor listening, and it blends right into the scenery.
For more-powerful outdoor sound, we love the Victrola Rock Speaker Connect — one of our picks for best outdoor speakers — for backyard listening. The battery-powered Bluetooth speaker doesn’t require wires — your loved one can just position it anywhere on their lawn or deck and pair it with a phone. The battery can charge either through a USB-C connection or through a solar panel on top. It comes as a single speaker, but up to 20 of them can connect for a larger, louder system.
This handheld PC has a huge inventory of games to choose from, and its shape is ergonomic.
For a gamer on the go, the handheld Steam Deck has plenty to offer. It has a massive catalog of games, an open-source operating system, and it’s comfortable to hold in hand. Plus, it comes with its own travel case, so you don’t have to buy another accessory to gift it. Wirecutter’s Thorin Klosowski says it’s his “favorite way to play games,” and he recommends it “to anyone who likes to tinker but doesn’t want to build a gaming desktop.”
This power bank is small and light, and its rounded edges make it easy to slip into a pocket. It has two built-in cables and enough capacity to charge most smartphones up to three times.
The Belkin BoostCharge Plus 10K, our favorite portable charger, weighs about 8 ounces, and is the perfect size and shape for slipping into a pocket. With its USB-C Power Delivery port, it can charge most handheld devices — it has enough juice to charge most smartphones up to three times. And it can recharge itself at top speed with the right USB-C cable and wall charger. Because it has two cables, it can receive and give a charge at the same time. But it comes only in basic black.
This wireless charging station can power as many as three devices, and it props up your phone and watch for easy viewing. It comes with its own wall charger, but it takes up more desk space than our other picks.
The Belkin MagSafe 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Stand 2nd Gen is our top pick for wirelessly charging an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods simultaneously. Available in black or white, it’s faster than most models we tested, and it comes with a 5-foot cord and has a two-year warranty. While it has a large footprint, it’s sleek and sturdily built. If someone you love is an Apple product devotee, they can’t do better for keeping their beloved gadgets organized and quickly, reliably juiced.
This Tapo strip light set is affordable and bright, produces accurate colors, has features that others strip lights don’t, and is dead simple to set up and use.
Especially popular with Gen Z, smart strip lights are made of a flexible rubbery material with embedded LEDs, and they are designed to be more permanent than seasonal string lights. One of our favorite smart strip light is the TP-Link Tapo Smart Wi-Fi Light Strip L930-5 because getting it up and running involves a minimal learning curve. Setup and control are both simple, and all of the features are straightforward and easy to use. This smart strip light also produces accurate colors and brightness, and it has a bunch of less common features, such as Scenes, Animations, and Away Mode.
This bird feeder has a 1080p camera with a wide viewing angle, includes an easy-to-fill seed bin, and offers options for local and cloud video storage.
If your giftee takes a digital approach to all things — playing music, communicating, turning off the lights — consider the world’s most techy bird feeder. The Netvue Birdfy Feeder — our pick for a smart bird feeder — has an integrated camera to capture 1080p photos and videos of visiting avian friends (and squirrels). Its wide, 135-degree viewing angle will allow them to see the full bird, and it has color night vision to capture critters after dark. If your gift recipient wants to brag about an indigo bunting, they can share photos and clips with other Birdify owners in the community section of its app.
This 3D printer makes great prints with no manual calibration, and takes only a short time to set up.
May be out of stock
Tech-savvy creators, creatives, and engineering types can have a ball with a 3D printer. Our top pick for a relatively affordable home version is the Bambu Lab A1 Mini. It has a blessedly simple setup procedure, automatically calibrating itself and removing one of the most annoying hurdles to getting started. The A1 Mini has software similar to that of its more expensive siblings in the P1 and X1 lines, and it’s lacking only in upgrades meant for printing the trickier materials ABS and carbon fiber. It has a build capacity of 18cm square which is large enough for both hobbyists and people who design and sell prints.
This reliable smart plug includes real-time energy monitoring and an Away Mode. Also, it’s widely compatible with all the major smart-home platforms.
This compact smart outlet comes in a pack of four, so it’s an easy addition to multiple stockings. The TP-Link Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Plug Slim (EP25) combines all of the best features you could want in a smart plug — reliable control and scheduling, energy monitoring, and an Away Mode for vacations — at an affordable price. Though it isn’t the smallest smart plug available, it doesn’t block the neighboring outlet when plugged in. If you think your gift recipient might want an entire strip of smart outlets stuffed into their stocking, pick up the TP-Link Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Power Strip (HS300), which has six independently controlled outlets.
This printer creates film-like, credit-card-sized images that are vibrant and fun. It’s about the size of a small hard drive, so you can take it with you just about anywhere.
Instant cameras and photos never go out of style, and Fujifilm’s latest instant photo printer makes it easy to print any photo on your camera roll. The Fujifilm Instax Mini Link 3 prints consistently beautiful images that are a little smaller than a credit card; the device itself is about the size of a portable hard drive and comes in white, pink, or sage green. It’s easy to set up — your gift recipient could be printing photos within five minutes of unwrapping it. Make sure to get them a pack of film, too.
The Aura Carver stands out for its easy setup, vivid display, pleasing design, and near-zero pillarboxing.
A digital photo frame can be enjoyed by many, including parents and grandparents who want to easily enjoy family photos, travel lovers who have too many photos of their adventures for a fridge, or people who have lots of new photos from a big milestone. The Aura Carver in particular is a fantastic gift for any of these people in your life. Though cheaper options are available, the Aura Carver is the best choice for easy uploading, fantastic photo quality, and security for the uploaded photos. Plus, it allows many people to add photos to the frame. So it’s a great gift for those who have large households or extended family and friends they would like to see photos from.
The only Google Nest speaker with a camera, this smart display can make video calls, and its 10-inch display and built-in software are great for watching streaming video and displaying recipes.
May be out of stock
The Google Nest Hub Max has a 10-inch HD screen mounted atop a stereo speaker. It can stream video from Netflix, YouTube, and other services, display personal photos or content from the web, and pull feeds from smart security cameras. It’s the first Google Smart Display with a built-in video camera, so your recipient can make video calls or keep an eye on the room when they’re away with the motion-triggered camera that can pan and zoom to follow movement around the room (don't worry, this can be switched off for privacy). Its most sci-fi feature might be “face match” which recognizes each person in the family by face and automatically switches to their preferences. And, of course, it syncs with all of the user’s Google stuff so they can wake up to their calendar tasks if they so choose.
AirTags leverage Apple’s huge network of devices to find lost goods, and they’re impressively accurate in pinpointing an item’s precise location.
Costco membership required (1st gen, pack of four)
Everybody knows someone (or is someone) who loses their keys on a daily basis. Associate staff writer Haley Perry is one, and she has a Bluetooth tracker attached to her keys to make them easier to find. This is a great gift for anyone prone to losing smaller items. If you’re shopping for an iPhone owner, get them an Apple AirTag, which employs the massive network of nearby Apple devices to help find the item; when the AirTag is within the iPhone’s Bluetooth range, it can pinpoint the item within inches. If you know an Android owner, the latest model of the Tile Mate is a great choice.
This car phone mount has a quick charging speed, top stability, and it’s easy to use.
Give your favorite driver a wireless charging phone mount so they can worry less about bringing along charging cords and getting directions. Mounted on an air-conditioner vent, on the dashboard, or in a CD-slot base, the iOttie Easy One Touch Wireless 2 Dash & Windshield Mount will make life easier when your giftee drives, and it will keep their phone from jostling while their car is in motion. Of all the wireless charging phone mounts for cars we tested, this model is our favorite.
This drone offers DJI’s autonomous features and a 4K camera that can shoot in portrait or landscape orientation, all in a tiny package weighing less than 250 grams. Note that it doesn’t include obstacle avoidance.
You save $220 (31%)
(with DJI RC remote)
The DJI Mini 3 is our favorite less-expensive drone for most drone-photography beginners because it’s by far the easiest model to fly in its price range. For less than half the price of our top pick, it still offers a 4K camera, a long (38-minute) battery life, and a compact, lightweight build that just slides under the FAA’s 250-gram limit. This model also comes with all the important features your giftee might need from a video drone, such as image and flight stabilization, an included controller, and smart flight modes, in which the drone flies itself to easily capture cinematic shots. But it lacks the obstacle-avoidance sensors of pricier models.
This tripod is light enough to take anywhere but strong enough for the heaviest smartphones and even some cameras.
May be out of stock
The flexible Joby GorillaPod 1K Kit is useful in so many situations. Our team especially recommends it for taking time-lapses, videos, and low-light photos. This tripod has a small build and moldable legs, so it’s easy to throw in a backpack or to bring on road trips, and it’s ideal for taking timed group shots or selfies. Give this to your favorite traveler or budding videographer, and they’ll be able to get their dream shots more easily.
We love finding gifts that are unusual, thoughtful, and well vetted. See even more gift ideas we recommend.
Nena Farrell contributed reporting. This article was edited by Hannah Morrill and Jennifer Hunter.
Samantha Schoech
I discover, vet, and write about gifts of all kinds from my office in San Francisco. I am particularly drawn to all things shiny or bookish, but I try not to impose my taste more than is strictly necessary.
by Ellen Lee
Advice from a dozen experts on the best presents for kids. They don’t have to be big or expensive, but merely used and loved over time.
by Wirecutter Staff
by Samantha Schoech
by Samantha Schoech and Mari Uyehara
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Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).