Affordable tech: It's not all luxury

LAS VEGAS — The head shakes came faster at each booth of the Consumer Electronics Show.

A cool gadget for under $100? Of course not. This is the future of technology, the sales reps would say — it's gotta be expensive.

Even when the gadget looked cheap from the outside — say, the "Tron"-like video eyewear from Icuiti — it was always $300 and up.

When I did find cheap gizmos, they were just that. Cheap.

Example: The ZVUE video player, which is selling for $99 at Wal-Mart. It felt like a children's toy, yet you needed to use complicated video encoding and decoding to get anything worthwhile to play on it. Pointless.

There were also numerous nifty-looking cameras, mp3 players and portable video players for under $100 in a section I'll call Knockoff Alley, an all-gadget Koreatown and Chinatown. Plenty of cheapies there, but they felt ready to disintegrate in your hands.

My quest for affordable technology was not all in vain, though. Here are some of the best under-$100 gadgets on display at the show and available in coming months:

CELL CONTACTS SAVED

Lose a cell phone? Don't lose your friends. If you've ever had to go through the painstaking process of inputting all your old contacts into a new phone, you know how, well, painful it is. Many new phones come with ways to store or sync contacts with a computer, but that sometimes requires extra software and a bit of tech savvy. With BackupPal, it doesn't. Just plug the rugged device in to your phone, press a button and it stores up to 1,000 contacts. You can't buy it yet, though. The startup manufacturer is now looking for distribution.

Price: $40, plus $15 for optional adapter cables for various service providers and phones.

Site: www.backup-pal.com

IPOD KEPT DRY

An Associated Press writer who tested H20 audio's "waterproof" iPod cases in 2004 found the following: "splash and snow proof: maybe. Waterproof at minimal depths for a very short period of time: not." Ouch. The San Diego company has kept plugging away, though, and at CES they showed off an encased iPod fully immersed in water and pumping out tunes. The seal is tighter and the iPod, thusly, drier. They're designed to keep the iPod dry in up to 10 feet of water. There's even a dive case, that keeps water out at depths up to 300 feet, though it exceeded my $100 limit.

Price: $40 for a Shuffle case, $80 for nano, $90 for video. Headphones not included.

Site: www.h20audio.com

SATELLITE RADIO GETS AFFORDABLE

Used to be you couldn't get satellite radio without a sky-high price tag. They've now come down to earth. You can get started on XM or Sirius for under $100 easily enough — though of course there's always that $12-13 a month subscription fee. Along with prices, tuners are shrinking. The tiny XM Passport is essentially a chip that plugs into an XM-ready home or car system and makes a single subscription more portable than ever before. (In satellite radio, you pay per tuner.)

Price: As low as $50 to $60 for the plug-and-play RoadyXT or XM Sportscaster, or $70 for the Sirius Starmate. For the next-gen technology, it's $30 for the Passport, $30 for an adapter. There is a major catch though: for now, it's at least $300 to get an XM-ready base tuner.

Site: www.xmradio.com and www.sirius.com

BLUETOOTH TO THE MASSES

Amid all the extravagant video- and mp3-playing cell phones, there stood the no-frillers. And they were good. The next generation of Nokia's mass-market line — the 6103 — will include Bluetooth connectivity. As will the lower-end Motorola phones like the L2 (featuring RAZR-inspired styling) and C139 and C261. It's about time everybody got a chance to try Bluetooth, which has the potential to eliminate a lot of wires from your personal tech life. (On higher-end devices, there's now even a stereo version enabling short-range transmission of music.)

Price: About $50 for the Nokia 6103, and a bit more for the Motorola phones.

Site: www.nokiausa.com and www.hellomoto.com