Security alarms for women are not a new concept. They are however a very good idea, particularly at this time of year when almost the only time you're outdoors is when it's dark!

Alarms though have often been very utilitarian - very little effort being put into make it attractive. It's an alarm, right? Well the problem with that is it'll be stuffed in the bottom of a bag or deep in a pocket and should it be required, difficult to find.

"ila Dusk" takes the alarm concept and make two changes. The first is to make it actually look good so that it's more of an accessory than a utility (of course looks are in the eye of the beholder and being both male and colour blind I'm probably not the best judge). It's fashioned such that it can be attached to a bunch of keys or to a handbag.

The second is the alarm itself.

There are alarms every where. Burgular alarms, car alarms, alarms alarms and more alarms. Many are simply ignored as a false alarm.

The ila Dusk (a literal translation from Sanscrit of "Goddess of Speech") uses a high pitched female screech rather than a mechanical sound. The sound is truly terrifying and very loud.It's also very easy to use - much like a hand grenade simply tug on the chain to remove a pin and off it goes.

I'm considering giving each of my daughters one for those times now, as the get older, where they are walking to clubs or to friends.

The ila Dusk is available from Marks and Spenser for £19.50 with one of three visual colour schemes.

Thanks to everyone for joining in the fun with Christmas Cracker - it was a huge success for us and helped increase the number of members to the site significantly. Thanks of course to Photobox for sponsoring the crackers!

It is however now December, and for those of you that have been around GadgetSpeak for more than a year you'll know that means Santa's Sack time! Santa's Sack is our special advent competition to get you ready for the festive season. This year we've packed the sack with a wide variety of gadgety products with something to appeal to everyone.

With Day one drawing to a close all I can say is WOW - the number of visitors in this single day has beat the highest day we had in the entire Santa's Sack period in 2007 - so thanks to all of you that joined in the fun.

Want to know what all the fuss is about? Well we often run free competitions for members here at GadgetSpeak partly to encourage new visitors to join and also as a thank you to existing members. December is however the competition!

We have a sack of wonderful prizes that Santa himself would envy. For each of the first 20 days of December one prize will be drawn from the sack and awarded to one lucky GadgetSpeak member. There are hundreds of pounds worth of prizes to be won - and of course membership and entry to the competition is free!

Want to know more? Full details of santa's sack and all the prizes here!

I've found an offer on at Vtech with its V.Smile Cyber Pockets!

I've been a fan of the Vtech products for a while and they are usually my top choice for gift ideas for nieces and nephews. Given the current financial climate Vtech are trying to help out as much as possible to make this christmas easier so the offer of free delivery and cash back is a welcome sight.

The portable educational gaming system comes in blue or pink with either a scooby doo or cinderella game. A range of games are also available seperatly to keep the fun going.

Here is some more info about the cyber pocket...

Valves. Remember those? If you're under 40 quite possible you've never seen one. For many years though the valve, or Vacuum Tube, was the transistor of it's age - a key electrical component that enabled everything from your TV to your radio to your Hi-Fi.

It may seem a little odd then to talk about these tokens of a bigone age in the same sentence as the ultra-high tech Apple iPod. Not so however, as Logic 3 show with the latest addition to their range of iPod sound systems - the Valve80.  Hi-Fi buffs have long promoted the superior sound quality of valve technology - all but eliminating distortion and noise from the sound being amplified delivering it in unadulterated form to your ears.

The Valve80 can deliver 80W of power to two separate piano black speakers. It also looks completely different to your average black featureless iPod dock. This cool technology does come at a price though - £299, but for those that don't want to compromise on the quality of their sound this could be just the product.

We hope to have a full review shortly!

This month we have a special 'invite a friend' prize-draw in addition to our exciting Christmas Cracker.

You've already discovered how useful our reviews are so why not tell your friends just how good it is?

As a little incentive, for each person that joins as a result of an invitation from you, we'll add an extra entry for you into this prize draw. At the end of the month we'll draw a winner at random who will receive the excellent CRD-51 DAB radio/alarm from Roberts (see our review here).

The more people that join as a result of your invitation the greater the chance you have of winning

If you're logged in then click here to start inviting your friends.

You do of course need to be a member first so you may need to join!

Christmas is closing in fast and to get you in the mood GadgetSpeak have launched a special festive prize-draw for November.

We have four very special GadgetSpeak Christmas Crackers. Each Cracker contains four different prizes.

Each week we'll pull one cracker. The contents of that cracker will go to that weeks winning member. You can see all the prizes on our special cracker page but, as with Santa's Sack, the contents of each cracker is secret. We'll tell you the content of the current weeks cracker as soon as you login!

Oh - we can tell you that the nice people at PhotoBox have included your choice of personalised Calendar or Photo Book - using your very own photos - in each cracker.

What are you waiting for? Not a member? Sign-up here, it's free. Already a member? Just login to enter

(Do remember to read the terms and conditions!)

Kids of course have an excellent imagination when it comes to turning even the most mundane implement into a toy deserving hours of fun. Even a cardboard box can become an inter-galactic spaceship or a stage for a desirable residence for Barbi.

Argos want to tap into this wealth of young tallent and have launched a "Toy of the Future" competition. Open to anyone between the ages of 5 to 15 all they have to do is draw up their ideal new toy idea along with an explanation to what it is and why it's the best thing since sliced bread (or in this case the aforementioned cardboard box). Send the idea in to a special Argos competition site and they could win!

The winner will receive £500 worth of Argos vouchers and 10 runners up will receive a choice of toy, up to the value of £50 from the Argos catalogue.

Oh - and Argos will put the winning toy into production to be sold in their stores for Christmas 2009! Assuming the judges do a good job the winning design could be as popular as Barbi. If so then profits will be going to charity.

With a few days of half term still to go, and snow still on the ground what better way to keep the kids entertained?

Full details on the "Toy of the Future" web-site

We are working out way through some of the Dream Toys Top 12 Awards - one of which is Catcha Beast! by Ban Dai. It's a toy very much developed from the Tamagotchi stable.

Catcha Beast is a hand-held game - the aim of which is to Catch Beasts would could appear at any time around you. But you have to find them by using the digital compass, spinning in circles and reeling them in with the fishing rod like handle on the side. A little display shows you when the beasties are near. The beasts have names like Jewelogger and Skull Scissors. Once you've caught your beasts you can train them and you can trade them with friends who also have a Catcha Beast! Connecting with friends also allows you to play 2 player battle games.

A couple of downsides. As a not playful enough adult, I got as confused as I do with Sat Nav systems and couldn't really work it all out. But I'm sure kids will have a lot more patience than me and it is a toy that keeps developing to capure their interest. Like a Tamagotchi, the idea is to play with this toy over a period of time to catch and play with your beasts. Without a back light it's also hard to play in the dark.

On the plus side, it's inexpensive enough to call a stocking filler and the Catcha Beast does join other electronic toys such as the Wii and the Swinx in getting kids to move a bit whilst attached to their favourite gadget - which must be a good thing.

I found Catcha Beast from £17.99 at Amazon here.

Our last newsletter was the day before our new site look and feel was about to go live, and we had all of our fingers crossed for a smooth transition. Luckily everything went very well and I hope you'll agree the updated appearance on GadgetSpeak looks a lot better.

The changes were more than superficial though. As part of the upgrade we incorporated a number of changes requested by large number of people that completed our survey a few months back. Here's a list of the recent changes!

• Updated appearance (you probably spotted that one!)
• Gadget offers now included in weekly GadgetSpeak email
• Improved accessibility
• New - "Gadget News" section on the front page where talk about new gadgets and industry news we think you'll find relevant. We'll include our own opinions of course, and invite you all to leave comments to cover your own!
• Improved editor for those of you that want to write up your own reviews (come on - share your ideas with the rest of us!)
• Profile improvements so you can more easily upload a picture of yourself to your profile.
• An 'email a friend' link on each article so you can tell others about products you like (or if it pressie time, to drop a great big hint!)

SO......

What do you think? Please We've plenty of other ideas - just not enough time! Let us know what else you'd like to see on GadgetSpeak and we'll try and get your ideas into the system!

Thanks as always for your support!

The team at GadgetSpeak

Here at Gadgetspeak we are great fans of good technology and the Orbit MP3 speaker is definately one of our favourites from last year. So we're really pleased to see that Altec Lansing have announced the European launch of the New Orbit™ iMT237 MP3 Ultra Portable Music Speaker today.

The new Orbit iMT237 MP3 speaker has been updated with a rugged new design and improved functionality. It's new design is built for mobile lifestyles being light weight and shock resistant. And if it's anything like it's previous sibling, the sound quality, powered by Altec Lansing's award winning acoustic technology, will be stunning for such a small and portable speaker.

We're looking forward to receiving our review unit so we can test it out thoroughly and give you the detailed lowdown. We're sure it will make a great stocking filler this Christmas for iPod users everywhere!

The Orbit iMT237 has a recommended price of £29.99. The best price I've found for this very new product is £27 from Amazon.