Gadget Master

It's amazing what a trade show and an Apple event can generate. On a Gadget front, we are moving from the famine of summer to the feast of autumn.

In our Gadget of the Week roundup, there is no need to linger too long over Logitech's Wireless Guitar Controller or an interesting Net-enabled door lock (the Kwikset SmartCode with Home Connect deadbolt, right), which lets you remotely grant access.

And projectors never hold my attention to long, notwithstanding Samsung's A600 home system, or JVC's D-ILA HD projectors, featuring a "wire-grid optical engine". Though, Nikon's VP650 pico projector camera - speculatively tipped for a September release by Slashgear - did catch my eye.

LG has also been busy, launching two new HDTV lines - "The LG LH85 series and 55LHX set both have wireless transmitter boxes that can throw full, uncompressed 1080p streams from your components to the TV over 30 feet away," reports SlashGear. Not forgetting its LG XD3 Slim portable hard drives.

And there's also Motorola launching a wimax-wifi-base-station-usb-dongle, and Acer's new Ferrari One notebook (running AMD's Congo platform, with a dual-core AMD Athlon X2 L310, at 1.2GHz, with 1MB of L2 cache).

But among the big beasts of the Gadget Jungle, I was serioulsy thinking of nominating Motorola's new social-networking-friendly Android-based smartphone, the CLIQ. Or Dext, it seems, we should call it in the UK. It features a 5.0-megapixel camera, QWERTY keypad, Wi-Fi, and microSD expansion, reports Techeblog.

In the week of Steve Jobs' public re-emergence and a raft of announcements from Apple, however. I wouldn't dare stray to far from Cupertino. So, for all the newly-coloured iPod shuffles (including a stainless steel "special edition"), or re-priced iPods, or iTunes 9, or  this-week's-Gadget-of-the-week is... fifth-generation iPod nano.

As well as a larger 2.2in display, the latest nano now also features 8 or 16GB of storage, a video camera, new casing, FM radio and even a Nike-supported pedometer.

Check out this Slashgear roundup of the Apple event or our sister title's Inspecta-Gadget blog.