Tic Tac Toast
$2.99
Stick this plastic grid into a piece of bread before you place it in the toaster (we assume this isn’t a safety hazard). When the toast pops, yank out the plastic grid and you’ll have a tic-tac-toe game board. Play with a roommate: peanut butter versus jelly. The winner eats the toast.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Air Hogs Havoc Heli
$29.95
Perfect for when you’re trapped indoors during a snowstorm. Annoy your hall-mates with this foam remote-control helicopter that can reach heights of up to 100 feet. It can buzz about for six minutes per charge — that’s one minute per AA battery. It can hover in one spot and knock on your neighbor’s door while you stand in your room.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Creative Zen Mozaic
$59.99
At only 1.5 ounces, why buy a flash drive when you can carry around this MP3 player instead? The Creative Zen Mozaic looks artsy, holds 2 GB of music and can function for 32 hours as an alarm clock, calendar, voice recorder, FM radio, address book and, of course, an external storage device. You can also view photos on its 1.8-inch screen. It’s the perfect affordable MP3 player to take to the library, the gym or on a jog.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
JVC NX-PN7 iPod/iPhone Audio System
$149.99
Roommates needn’t fight over who will be the one to DJ the dorm party. With JVC’s dual-docking and charging iPod speakers, roommates can share the remote control and play playlists from their own iPod — with each iPod playing from the same set of speakers. The NX-PN7’s sound easily fills up a 12x12 dorm room, and the changing LED light colors (each iPod gets its own color rotation in slot A or slot B) add a bit of decor pizzazz.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Headplay Personal Cinema System
$499.99
You know the drill: Your roommate wants to study in your dorm room and insists on quiet and calm. You, of course, want to watch a movie. One possible solution to this scenario is the Headplay Personal Cinema System. Simply plug your PC, DVD player or iPod into the Headplay box unit — or insert a memory card or thumb drive with video stored onboard — and put the visor on over your eyes. The Headplay will display an image that appears to be the size of a 52-inch TV, with a resolution of 1024 x 768.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Philips LivingColors Mini
$168
This one’s for the dorm decorator. When Philips launches its LivingColors Mini in December, you’ll be able to change your room decor 256 different ways. The compact LED lamp washes white walls in various shades and patterns to suit your mood. The lights are controlled via a color wheel where you can preset your favorite color routines. After all, dorm room wall painting is generally a no-no.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
MP3 Lightcast
$38.97
If the Philips LivingColors Mini seems a bit simple and pricey, the MP3 Lightcast might be a better fit for you, especially if you like your light shows to coordinate with your music listening. Lightcast is under $40 and only has 33 LEDs and eight sequences, but it pulses, flashes, fades and matches your music selections. A mirror and lens help the LEDs cast patterns on your walls. Psychedelic, baby.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
SlingBox AV
$129.99
This is one back-to-school gadget you’ll want to leave at home. That’s because your dorm room probably doesn’t have cable or satellite service. If you set the SlingBox AV up at your parents’ house, where cable and satellite exist, you can watch all of those channels on your laptop at school, even 3,000 miles away and when the TV isn’t on. You can even view the contents of your old DVR. You needn’t say goodbye to HBO.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Sapphire HD 4870 X2 2G GDDR5 PCI-E
$549
For serious gamers, no other hardware upgrade delivers as much bang for the buck as a new graphics card, and Sapphire’s HD 4870 X2 represents the fastest board you can buy. Under all of that extravagant cooling you’ll find a pair of AMD’s RV770 graphics processors, each complemented by 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. The chips render the latest games at the same time, so you essentially get the performance of two Radeon HD 4870 cards together. The 4870 X2 is more convenient through, because it only takes up one PCI Express slot. It’s faster too, since each GPU gets a full gigabyte of memory instead of 512 MB.
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
Hasbro Tooth Tunes
$10
With games, movies and music all around your dorm room and in your pocket, why not put a little entertainment in your oral hygiene routine? Hasbro’s Tooth Tunes toothbrush will remind you to brush for a full two minutes (like dentists recommend) as you listen — through the vibrations from your teeth into your inner ear no less — to a tune. We like “Brush It,” Hasbro’s rendition of Devo’s “Whip It.”
Check out our Back To School guide to gear that will help you take care of the academic side of school.
