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Real men need gadgets but picking the category-busters is never easy. Duncan Madden, a former editor of Boys Toys magazine and one of Britain's leading technology journalists, on the five best gizmos for blokes. Click to view Top 5 Boys Toys.
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Best For Action (Suunto X9i) |
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 If you live your life on the edge of adventure, always striving for the next action-packed slice of excitement, the Suunto X9i wristop computer should be your companion of choice. With built-in GPS, altimeter, barometer, compass, thermometer and much more besides, the X9i is so clever it can even tell the time. (Compare Prices) |
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| When is a watch not a watch? When telling the time is the last thing you use it for. Nope, not a value Christmas cracker joke but the best way to describe Suunto’s X9i action-tastic timepiece. Sorry, wristop computer. But that’s exactly what the X9i is, a one-stop computing solution to keeping you in the know and safe no matter what adventure you’re embarking on this week, described by The Register as “the pinnacle of wristop navigational computers”. (Compare Prices) |
Action Packed |
 The upgrade and successor to the Suunto X9, voted the ‘Best Product of 2004’ by no less than Fortune Magazine, the X9i is the world’s smallest and lightest watch with in-built GPS.
And alongside the GPS system sits an altimeter (for measuring altitude and vertical speed) that features an altitude alarm and thermometer; a barometer (for measuring sea level pressure, absolute pressure and temperature) that features a weather trend graph and weather alarm; and a compass with bearing and tracking functions.
Basic watch functions include calendar, three alarms with date option, dual time and stopwatch and water resistance to 10 bar, but it’s the GPS functionality that really wets our whistle. (Compare Prices) |
GPS |
| Where GPS-enabled watches have in the past looked like something out of the Flintstones, the Suunto X9i treads a different path, and is physically pretty tiny – ideal if you’re out training and don’t want to end up with one arm looking like Popeye’s. (Compare Prices) |
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 This isn’t just your common or garden enter-your-post-code-and-go GPS though; the X9i has plenty of amazing tricks up its sleeve. If you’ve got a weekend of adventuring in mind, you can plan your routes at home with a map or on your PC and then download them to your watch with the accompanying software and USB link. When you’re out a-hiking (or mountaineering, fishing, orienteering, hunting … you get the idea), your watch will guide you in the right direction alongside telling you how fast you’re going, how far you’ve gone and have to go, and what time you’ll be arriving at your destination based on your current speed. And thanks to its extensive memory, the X9i can store up to 50 routes and 500 waypoints at any one time. But that’s just for starters.
If you come across a place you particularly like (say, a spot with a great view) on your adventuring, you can save the co-ordinates to your watch with a name you can remember for later reference. Or mark it as a ‘home’ position and once you’ve wandered off, just hit the ‘find home’ function and you’ll be given the route and distance back. Clever. But if you just find yourself out and about ambling, you can also use the Suunto to track your movements for later analysis of distance covered, speed and route, or just retrace your route back to where you started – labelled the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ feature by online boffins Tech Digest. (Compare Prices) |
Google Earth |
 Once home safe and sound, with all your data downloaded there’s even an online community to tap into, discuss and get as geeky with as you want. But the latest and in our view one of the coolest add-ons to the Suunto X9i range comes with the all-new free software that allows users to view and share adventures on Google Earth – one of the best websites on the entire world wide web.
The Suunto Track Exporter software means you can export your ‘tracks’ from your X9i to Google Earth so they can be viewed anywhere in the world with real satellite imagery – zoom in from outer space to within 200 feet, email and blog them and even do three-dimensional flyovers of the whole route. A crazy feature that really brings the technology home and makes it accessible and exciting to relive your adventures from the comfort of your armchair, wherever you are in the world.
Competing in Costa Rica's Guanaride, one of the toughest and most spectacular mountain bike events in the world, pro cyclist Manuel Bustelo commented, “I can post my Suunto X9i blogs to my website and visitors can download them and see exactly where I’ve ridden. It’s a great tool for sharing my rides with friends and fans.” (Compare Prices) |
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To buy this product try one of the following retailers. They are all competitively priced and reliable:
Facewest - A great specialist UK retailer
Shop.com - A major UK shopping site
Moosejaw - A great US specialist retailer
Amazon.com - US arm of the world’s biggest internet retailer
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