Christmas gifts don't always have to be silly (although they're often our favourites), with a little bit of forward planning you can buy a home appliance which is very practical, looks good and doesn't break the bank.

Here's our pick of ten quirky, sparkly and colourful lights that are exciting enough to be wrapped up under the tree, but are a little more grown up than singing, dancing speakers.

One of the main reasons an iPad is so appealing is because it's slim, compact and easy to hold.

But sometimes you just don't have enough limbs to hold it still, like when you're following a recipe or driving and other times you just don't want to because you're trying to relax.

Sure there are thousands of special stands on the market, but it might look better, prove to be more secure AND less annoying in the long run to mount the iPad to something, whether that be a wall, a fridge or even your own body.

Ahh coffee, one minute it's bad for us and making us hallucinate, the next it's a miracle cure for everything from Alzheimer's to baldness. But whether you're a self confessed Starbucks addict or an "only the finest" coffee connoisseur, there's no denying how amazing the stuff is. Watch this lovely piece of coffee propaganda if you don't believe me.

However, arguably the best things about coffee aren't always the way it smells and tastes. We love the act of drinking, discussing and most importantly making the stuff. Therefore it's no surprise there are all kinds of gadgets and appliances that have been specially designed to enhance that experience.

So here's a list of our top ten coffee-making contraptions, some are sadly just prototypes at the moment, others are firm favourites and we admit a few just look good.

Wow. Samsung really has been busy.

Today at IFA, the tech giant has launched its new robotic cleaning device, the Navibot S. The smart little robot promises to give you hands-free, automated cleaning just like the older model, the Navibot, but with more advanced technology and all kinds of new functionality.

When Anna reviewed the original Samsung Navibot in February last year, her main concerns were that it bumped into things a little too much, it was slow and it wasn't good at picking up bits and pieces near to bigger objects.

Samsung seemed to have directly responded to Anna's issues with the improvements to the latest model, which is meant to be much faster with upgraded sensors to stop it bumping into things AND improve its general performance when it comes to cleaning around the edges of rooms.

I'm still not convinced everyone would be happy with the results, but its certainly a big step forward in automated household appliances.

There's no official word about when the Navibot S is going to be available, but we'll update you when we know.

Fed up with your dishwasher and your kitchen light being in different places? Some genius has combined the two to make.. err... a kitchen light that is also a really small dishwasher.

Don't ask us what the thought process was, we don't know.

Kim Joonmin made it as a "concept".

Design blog Yanko highlight some of the advantages of the ground-breaking device:

"The idea is to have a functional light stationed right above the dining table, so that you have easy access to routine dishes like plates and spoons. It conserves space and apparently integrates technologies that recycles & purifies used water for the next cycle."

Oh right then.

[via Popgadget]

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It doesn't matter whether you consider yourself to be a dog person or a cat fanatic. We can all agree that coming home from work to be greeted by the family pet is a lovely feeling.

But if the hairs from your cat or dog send you into a spate of sneezing because of your allergies, then your love can be severely tested.

Thankfully, the Dyson DC25 Animal Bagless Vacuum Cleaner helps man and his favourite pet co-exist by reducing the problem of irritating allergies.

This Dyson vacuum cleaner has a Mini Turbine Head to make short work of hair from cats and dogs, as well as other animal related dirt. It can get into tight places on stairs, upholstery and even in cars.

Using Dyson's Root Cyclone Technology, this upright vacuum cleaner will never suffer from a loss of suction. It is also as gentle as it is durable, with its motorised brush bars providing a soft touch on hard floors and delicate carpets.

The Dyson DC25 Animal Bagless Vacuum Cleaner has a HEPA filter with a Bactisafe screen to clean and expel air, making life easier for allergy sufferers.

You might think all these features would make the Dyson difficult to move around, but it weighs just 7.5kg and has the patented 'Ball' technology, so you can manoeuvre it with a flick of your wrist.

This Dyson vacuum cleaner is perfect for anyone who wants to live in a happy and clean home with their pets.

Wimbledon is only five days away and we're hoping Murray might make it all the way to the top this year.

To keep us entertained until we can don our 3D glasses to see all the action on centre court, we thought it would be interesting to see what tennis related gadgets are out there.

A toothbrush sanitiser that looks like a ninja? Yes, we're on our knees begging for more.

Okay, after the initial rush of pleasure at something that combines two of our favourite things (er, actually make that one of our favourite things, we're still not totally convinced by toothbrush santisation) we thought we should drill down into the facts a bit harder. The idea behind toothbrush sanitisation is that the fewer germs on your toothbrush the better. To that end this ninja uses a technique they use in hospitals: radiating UV light to kill germs.

It's not an instant thing, your brush has to sit in the Ninja for 6-7 minutes until it has reached the required level of cleanliness. Then after it has been bathed in germicidal UV light, it's ready and should have 99.7% of its germs removed.

It's pretty fun and we are a fan of the karate chop insert toothbrush action, but as you might have realised if you use a toothbrush regularly, unsanitised toothbrushes aren't life-threatening. Change your toothbrush every so often and you should be fine.

One for the real gadget fans, cleanliness freaks, or people who live with housemates who borrow their toothbrush. Could also be good for travellers.

£24.95 from CuteBitz

If it takes more than wailing sirens to get you out of bed, maybe you should investigate the Doro HearPlus 333cl + Pillow Shaker.

Pop the sturdy cuboid clock under your pillow, set its vibrate mode on, and as well as pumping out decibels and flashing a light it will start buzzing and sending vibrations out through the pillow that you are mistakenly clutching in an attempt to shut out the real world.

No escaping that alarm clock. Initially designed for those with hearing impairments, it functions as well for the slug-a-beds, heavy sleepers and those with a habit of ignoring the weaker alarms on smaller clocks.

I guess you'll jump out of bed in a state of terror and adrenalin, but hey, at least you'll be awake...

The Doro HearPlus 333cl, £49.99 on bigeasyphone.com here

Baskets woven out of telephone wire may not sound like must-have it-items for the average house. I mean you'd just get a standard basket if you wanted a basket wouldn't you?

But despite being sceptical about the whole concept, I was won over by these Zenzulu baskets from Aram. Fair-trade, eco-friendly and winning awards for their design, these are some pretty nice baskets that look good in strong black and red patterns. Local village women weave the discarded wires together to create the baskets as designed by a S African designer Marisa Fick-Jordaan.

A twist on the traditional Easter baskets perhaps?

Zenzulu woven baskets, £85 from Aram.co.uk
nb: these claim to be new in store, though at time of writing, I couldn't find them on the website.

Hi-fi and home cinema makers Onkyo - known for high-end audio equipment and selling the UK's most popular receivers have released a few more budget and affordable home cinema systems.

[NB: What's a receiver? - a receiver takes the audio and images fed in from somewhere like Sky or a DvD player and amplifies them: improving both sound quality and image definition to cinema standards.]

For those with a bit less time to lavish on reading receiver and speaker specifications, Onkyo have put together some budget packages including both meaning that you only need to sort out the screen yourself and you've got a high quality cinema experience for your sitting room.

Their three speaker plus receiver packages:

HT-S6305 - 5.1-channel Home Cinema receiver/Speaker package with iPhone/iPod dock - £500
"Our top of the range package offers a specification that's bleeding edge in every respect. Comprising the TX-SR508 7.1-channel receiver (see separate release for full details) and gloss-black finished HTP-638 5.1-channel speaker system (with wall-mountable satellites) this high-performance combo will leave your senses dizzy with excitement when fed a Blu-ray with a HD audio soundtrack."

HT-S5305 - 5.1-channel Home Cinema receiver/Speaker package - £400
"Don't need all the power and features of the HT-S6305? This option will save you a tidy sum of money while delivering all the essentials for a knock-out home cinema experience. Based around the HT-R538 5.1-channel receiver and HTP-538 Gloss Black 5.1-speaker system this option is slightly more modestly powered, offering 5 x 100w plus 100w from the active subwoofer."

HT-S3305 - 5.1-channel Home Cinema receiver/Speaker package - £330
Calling this an entry-level package really doesn't do it justice. Built to the same impressive standards as its two higher-end cousins this package is based around the slightly simpler HT-R380 5.1 channel receiver, delivering a hefty 5 x 100w of power.
The accompanying HTP-338 5.1 speaker system features a slimline, slightly less substantial active subwoofer than found with the HT-S5305, making this well-specified package eminently suitable for smaller rooms.

Available in Black or Silver from April 2010: purchase on Onkyo or from most other retailers

A pair of scanners dedicated to rescuing old photos, negatives and slides from oblivion has recently gone on sale in e-tailer site Firebox. The two intelligent scanners, the Pics 2 PC and the Pics 2 SD digitise old image content letting you store and use it online.

Images can be scanned on any scanner of course but these have a special slide slot in which negatives or slides can be inserted, turned into pictures and copied. The 5.1 megapixel scanners also feature auto exposure and colour balance, and boast a high quality optical element.

As the names suggest, Pics 2 PC lets you transfer your digitised image to your computer via a USB cable and Pics 2 SD lets you transfter pictures to SD cards.

Yes, this should speed the flow of late nineties photos onto facebook.

Pics 2 PC scanner - £119.99
Pics 2 SD scanner - £139.99 both on Firebox

More intelligent white goods from Samsung's Vienna show with the OmniPro Microwave. Not only does the OmniPro cook your food, it knows how much to cook your food and makes helpful suggestions based on the weight and humidity of the items you put in it.

Packing both weight and humidity sensors in the stainless steel case, you select what type of food you've put inside (bread/vegetables/meat) and how well you want it done (soft/al dente etc) there's an LCD display which suggests an appropriate cooking time.
You can set it to stop when the food is defrosted or fully cooked. Samsung claim this is both better for you - food will be cooked and also better for the environment - if you use only what you need, you require less energy.

Checking it out "in the flesh" the OmniPro is a bit of a mammoth creation with a 36litre capacity and measuring WxHxD (mm): 520 x 403 x 453, so think about how much space you've got in your kitchen before launching in with this one.

It's also got some accessories like the appealingly-named "Crusty Plate" - intended for grilling browning and baking pizzas and so on as it transmits the heat to both top and bottom of the dish.

549 euros for the stainless steel OmniPro with a steamer
499 euros for the OmniPro in black

Samsung's fluff-collecting bot unveiled in Vienna yesterday is cute. The Navibot is an intelligent floor cleaner with visual and infra-red sensors making it the smartest thing to crawl around your floor since the stick insects died. But the stick insects were never this complex.

A disc shaped object the size of a soup tureen the Navibot has two processor chips, an embedded camera, sensors and a virtual mapping system. Plus two rotating brushes and vacuum cleaner to pick up crumbs, fluff and loose dirt. What's so clever is that the bot auto-navigates by turning before it hits an obstacle - unlike the more common automatic cleaners which have to bump into stuff to sense them.

The wide angle camera embedded in the top creates a visual map of your home taking 30 pictures a second. Using this virtual map and combining it with information from the infra-red sensors, the NaviBot identifies the exact location of obstacles such as furniture and then calculates the quickest and safest route to take. When it gets low on charge it automatically returns to its charging dock for 2 hours and once full, returns to where it left off cleaning.
The Navibot can automatically detect what surface it's on too: carpet, wood, whatever and adjusts its cleaning style appropriately. There's a remote control too.

Watching the Navibot feeling its way around in the Samsung demo box like the sweet eager-to-please robot that it is, I was definitely impressed. Cute? Yes.

On the con side however, it was quite slow and it doesn't cover the edges of a room or around the base of items like sofas or chairs. So it won't replace your standard vacuum cleaner, especially if you want the job done quickly.

It's also not so good for anywhere with steps or busy houses - there's an obvious tripping risk in that while the bot knows perfectly well what it's doing, the movements could seem unpredictable to humans, it might be avoiding where the armchair was last week by suddenly reversing, but you're not to know that.

What would be sweet however is if you set it to clean before you left for work in the morning, you could come back and find one floor of the house nicely vacuumed without having to lift a finger. Good bot.

It looks like CDs and DVDs might be the victims of Spring Cleaning sessions in 2010. Apparently, spring cleans in 2010 are going deeper and further than they do in usual years according to research conducted to mark the launch of The Sims 3 Design & High-tech Stuff Pack.

The urge to declutter is particularly strong this year due to the freezing cold spell at the beginning of 2010, which left people stuck inside the house for longer than usual, that and because it's the beginning of a new decade. According to the report: Brits have cleared out £10.82billion worth of furnishings and material items already this year and the number of UK homes receiving a spring clean this year has increased by 24 per cent.

One of the main areas for a spring clean is home entertainment with 34% of Brits clearing out DVDs and CDs more than any other items this year, motivated undoubtedly by the increase of new ways to store music and films.

But people will want to fill all that new space with something and they still want to invest in gadgets. These are the items that people are planning to buy:
A new flat screen television - 35 per cent
Home computer/laptop - 20 per cent
New music/speaker system - 13 per cent

Well. Anyone ditching anything unusual this Spring?

Related: 10 things to do with old floppy disks

You know they way they say "oh don't reinvent the wheel".. well the team at Quirky have obviously taken that to heart, because they have only gone and reinvented the spoon.

News about the launch of the Quirky MugStir filled me with deep joy. More because rebranding the humble spoon as a MugStir was so innately hilarious than because it is actually a great technological advancement that will improve the world.

So it may look like a bent spoon to you, but let them explain it in their own words:

"MugStir is a community-designed portable spoon that hangs onto the side of a coffee mug or cup of tea. Bring your MugStir to work to replace those communal spoons, or to avoid wasting a new plastic spoon every time you need to stir a hot beverage."

[Surely, most spoons are portable? It would really be the exception to find a non-portable spoon]

"MugStir has a handle that clips to the side of your mug that is rubber-coated to protect the mug from scratches and your fingers from burns. It holds about 1/2 a teaspoon of liquid and acts as an ideal stirrer for your hot (or cold) beverage."

This PR team could sell anything.

I mock - I haven't tried it yet, and there are some positive comments on the product page in Quirky, though others complain that the bend prevents the spoon reaching to the bottom of the cup when stirring, and that the bend doesn't always 'clip' firmly in place but sort of hangs on the mug and slides around. Well, only one way to find out.

But kudos to Quirky for their ethos - bringing community-designed products to production, see more here.

A pack of 3 MugStirs costs $7.50 from the Quirky Store

One for the fan-ladies and fan-gents out there: an Apple desk lamp. Not made by Apple, no, they don't do that, but this piece of desk furniture is paying homage to Apple with every gram of its sturdy frame.

Incredibly made out of a recycled iMac, the iMac G4 lamp possibly references steampunk in its sturdy Victorian look and bears the pround mark of the Apple logo on its lampshade.

Full marks for green craftmanship to the Etsy artist Randall180 who created this gem. He has also made an iMac G4 clock.

the iMac G4 lamp on Etsy, "randall180"

[via gadgetsteria]

Do you get caught out by fly-a-way hairs or weird curly bits midway through the day? At a time when your bedroom and the implements need to sort it out are far away? Catering to this disastrous scenario, manufacturers Cloud Nine have brought out minature hair straighteners that fit in your handbag.

At 6 inches long and only 200g heavy, these are pretty small, though quite fierce too, reaching 150 farenheit.

The micro-iron is a traveller's hair straightener, made for travelling and featuring universal voltage so it works at the same power all over the world. The iron also features a hibernation mode where it automatically switches off after 10 minutes..

Cloud Nine micro iron is available from salons in the UK, priced at £45.00. Also available to buy online at www.cloudninehair.com

I've been waiting for the most depressing day of the year to be announced (one of my little hobbies..) and apparently it's today. Today, Monday the 18th January. 'Blue Monday' is always in January and usually the middle of January - when the glow from Christmas has faded off.

A cheery psychologist called Cliff Arnall has worked out six factors to calculate the day of the year on which people are most likely to be depressed: the weather conditions, debt level (the difference between debt accumulated and our ability to repay the debt), the time since Christmas, the time since failing to keep our New Year's Resolutions, low motivation levels and the pressure to take action.

Enough already. It's enough to make me close my head in my laptop in a vain attempt to find warmth and comfort in this cold world.

Anyway, where there's a human emotion, there's a gadget making company with a gadget to cater to it: and that is what the Lightbox is. It is essentially a light, but one which is supposed to improve your mood in the winter, particularly if you are affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder (or SAD).

Lightboxes ain't cheap costing between £75 and 265, though they come in a range of different sizes and intensities. My favourite is at the more affordable end - the DawnLite Natural Alarm Clock which wakes you up with light instead of an alarm.

As the Lightbox company put it: "Instead of being shaken awake in the dark winter months with a noisy radio or bleeper alarm the DawnLite will naturally and gradually increase the light in the room to replicate a summer dawn. The DawnLite is available for £79.90."

Personally I might be disappointed to discover that it is not in fact a summer dawn but actually a Tuesday, in January, but then that's probably a product of my bitter glass half-empty frame of mind. Gotta sort that out sometime.

To sufferers of SAD, there appear to be genuine benefits to time spent in Light Therapy. "Up to 85% of sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder see their symptoms improve when they use light therapy". See the site here for more information.

DawnLite is available from for £79.90 from The S.A.D. LightBox Company

If you're particular about how brown your toast is, finally there's a toaster that will let you check exactly how brown your toast is before switching the heat off.

It's a see-through toaster. Named the Vision Toaster, makers Magimix claim that it is the first toaster of its type in The World. The clear glass panels built into the walls let you see what's going on, while the long life quartz elements give constant heat for consistent browning.

Who knew toasters could reach such heights of technical perfection?

Simon Kinder, MD of Magimix explained the dream behind the Vision Toaster:
"People wanted to see their toast going brown while it hovered in front of them so they could toast it to perfection. Now they can do that and make sure it doesn't come out black or burned to a crisp."

Beautiful. This breakthough in the toasting world has admirers but also detractors with blog the L Magazine decrying it as nothing more than a "torture chamber for bread" sadistically fitted with observation windows. Lol. Well. Since I torture bread everyday, I'll easily be able to swallow my toast with an extra helping of guilt if need be. Just as long as its exactly the right shade of brown.

Costing £160, the Vision Toaster will be available in shops in the UK from January 2010.