Last year an estimated £4bn was spent on unwanted presents - the equivalent of £92 per person.  At Gadgetspeak we've seen a worrying trend of products that just won't make people happy this Christmas.  One thing we've noticed  is just how difficult it is to judge a product from it's packaging and advertising and yet this is exactly what many of you will be doing.

We're on a mission to make sure that you get totally unbiased views, so you can make the right choice.  I'll never forget the DVD game my daughter argued so heavily for one year that she spent her own pocket money on it.  It was heavily promoted on TV and piggybacked the success of another popular product. I have never seen such a disappointed little girl, the product was truly dreadful.  I tried to get her money back by saying this game was not worth the money, but because there was nothing physically wrong - we couldn't.  My daughter learnt a very valuable lesson not to trust advertising that day.

A couple of years on, and here at Gadgetspeak we will often get that same experience.  A product that is too difficult to use or just doesn't meet it's promises, like the electronic game whose only electronic bit is a recorded voice to announce the rounds of the game.  Others are just plainly badly made - look great on the packet and fall apart on opening.  Sometimes these products come from well  known brands.  In particular gadgets are sold on the back of marketing success of television characters or programmes.  There's nothing wrong with this as long as the product is great.

Take these simple steps to help make your Christmas Presents wanted presents:

• make sure you know someone who already has the product and ask their opinion
• check gadget review sites like Gadgetspeak
• check the user ratings on selling sites like Amazon
• find a shop where you can take the product out and physically play with it.

Every product that you see here on Gadgetspeak has been taken out of it's packaging and thoroughly played with by real people.  We read the manuals, test the products, and then put together our views good and bad for you to read.

As much as two thirds of your Christmas presents could end up unwanted - that's just money down the drain. Make sure you take these simple steps for a great Christmas day.

I'm sure many of you spotted last nights deliberate (!) mistake where we accidently left last months prize draw in the weekly site summary we email to members. Rather red faces here in the office today! Of course the F1 drive of a life-time was Octobers competition (it did at least say it was for October!). No - unfortunately we don't have another of those available for Novemeber.

Due to being far too busy, copy changes to the newsletter were missed.

We will have a new prize-draw for November as soon as we've had 5 minutes to sit down, take a few deep breaths and sort out something exciting to offer all our members. At the same time we'll do the draw for October and get in touch with the lucky winner.

Apologies again.

(what - you don't get the invaluable weekly updates? Apart from competition news - it includes a summary of all the product reviewed in the previous seven days. An ideal place to hunt for Christmas gift ideas for that hard to please family member. Why not sign up? If you're already a member then you can change your email preferences in your account settings.)

You could do with GadgetSpeak. After the success of our first two months members competitions we have something rather special, and a little different for October.

Nero are sponsoring this months competition to coincide with the latest release of their excellent Nero 8 suite - read the review here!

The lucky winner for October will have a choice. There wasn't a lot of room to describe the prizes on the login page, or the registration page so I thought I'd do so here.

Nero are also offering two runners up prizes of copies of Nero 8.

Formula One Experience

If chosen by the winner, the culmination of this days event will be the chance to drive an ex-Formula One racing car around a race track. That's only the highlight of the day though.

Before that you'll be driven around the track in a hot hatch or sports saloon by an experienced driver. I was lucky enough to do this a few years back and it's quite an experience to see just how fast some of these 'standard' cards can go, and the best way to take each turn.

Next it's your turn - driving either an MG, Ferrari 911 or a Porsche - with your instructor sat next to you offering tips and advice.

As long as you do well in that - you get to take the F1 car for a spin!

What more could you ask for? Well - just to complete the prize, you'll be offered accomodation for two and dinner!

Aston Martin AMV8 for the weekend

Be the envy of the neighbourhood with this little beauty sat on the drive. You could leave it there for the whole weekend, but we think you'll probably find somewhere to go.

You'll have the car for the best part of four days - from Friday morning through to Monday afternoon. Where would you go?

Whichever prize the eventual winner chooses, we're sure they will have a lot of fun!

Now - you and I both know that youTube, FaceBook and MyPlace are all legitimate business tools for generating contacts. You and I both know that - but some of us don't have an enlightened boss that understands yet how the modern world works. Finding you searching FaceBook for potential customers he or she is quite likely to quietly take you to one side and explain how your advanced, state of the art business skills are no longer required and introduce you to the large uniformed gentleman standing nearby, who will escort you from the building.

For people in this position an ideal aid arrived on our desk this week - a special Panic Button.

Simply plug this wee device into a spare USB port on your computer, install the accompanying software and when the boss appears - press the BIG RED BUTTON. Hey-presto, up pops a very traditional and business like spreadsheet. If spreadsheets aren't suitable you can create your own work-like desktop. £9.99 for job security - must be a bargain!

There is of course a serious reason why this invaluable tool dropped through our letter box. It's made by a company called 'Bluw'. They've been distributing their products successfully through a number of traditional gadget outlets in the UK for some time - products like the Panic Button, Finger Drums, Boxing Grannies and Desktop Girlfriend.

They've now launched their own on-line retail outlet at http://www.bluw.co.uk. If you're really stuck for that perfect, light-hearted gift for your office Santa's Sack then you might want to take a look.

Continuing the trend of ultra-realism Sega officially launch this latest version of their rally racing game on the 28th September for XBox 360, PC, Sony PSP and PS3. If the promotional video is anything to go by the graphics this time will be stunning. The little video to the right is a very small teaser of what to expect!

For those of you on XBox Live, Sega have already posted a demo featuring two sample race circuits, one in a steep sided canyon and the other in a mud-splattering tropical environment. If you give it a go please come back to GadgetSpeak and leave a comment to tell us what you think!

We're hoping to lay our hands on a copy shortly and let you know whether it manages to live up to the high expectations being set by Sega!

If you're not on XBox live, and just can't wait until the 28th then click here to pop over to the Sega Rally site where you'll find many more images along with higher quality video.

(This is our first attempt at adding video to the site and we'd welcome your feedback. Did it work on your computer? How long did it take to download? Would you like to see more video in future?)

We had about double the number of entrants in our second months prize draw - this time for the new iPod Nano recently announced by Apple. Thanks to all of you that entered! We've now chosen the lucky winner, and the three runners up that each receive a set of i-Station speakers, kindly donated by Logic3.

We'll contact the winners tomorrow, and as soon as they've confirmed their details and delivery addresses we'll pop their user names up here somewhere (might be time to create a winners page!)

Octobers prize is something pretty special (*not* another iPod this month!).

I need to find a few minutes to put together the details and get it posted up on the site. That doesn't stop you registering or logging in now though - you'll still be entered into the prize draw.

Just to re-iterate my message from last month though - please read the details on the login/registration page. We've still had a number of people that either haven't entered their name/phone number, haven't agreed to receive our rather cool weekly digest/newsletter or haven't gotton around to activating their account. The name/phone number is there to help us contact you and to weed out those few individuals that try registering lots of times on different emails to try and improve their chances of winning!

If you haven't won in September - good luck for october!

Nero 8 was released about a week ago. I've not used Nero for a while and the last version I used camme with a DVD writer I bought. We'll have a full product review of Nero 8 shortly, but for now, first inpressions!

First of all - this product does a lot, introducing itself as the worlds best selling 'digital multimedia suite'. The latest version builds on the success so far, adding support for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD along with integration with several on-line video sharing services including thei own 'My Nero'.

Functions include media playback, media creation and data backup and restore. For those of you without Windows Media Center or Vista Ultimate, Nero 8 includes a Media Center equivalent called 'Nero Home'.

For anyone that's used Nero in the past and found it difficult to find their way around, it's claimed this version has put a lot of effort into ease of use. Personally I still found a number of inconsistenciee, probably the result of disparate development teams for the various elements of the suite.

Because this application does so much a front-end application is provided - called 'StartSmart' that provides a task orientated interface with the intention of driving the inexperienced or occassional user to the correct part of the application based on what they want to do.

There are a few glaring ommissions - for example I found it impossible to generate a 'Flash Video' file, which is a popular format for on-line video publication.

At £49.98 from Amazon (RRP closer to £60) you get a lot of functionality for the price!

We'll have a full review shortly!

Update : Read the full review here.

Microsoft's Zune media player has been a pretty low-key affair so far, making very little impact on the media player market and even less on Apples dominance of that market. Microsoft however plays the long game, and often wins! Remember how long and how many iterations of Microsoft's hand-held operating system it took to take down the Palm Pilot? Palm had almost 100% market share for a long time and virtually created the market.

New versions of the Zune are launched today. There are three additions to the range : a 4G, 8G and 80G byte model, coincidently the same basic capacities as the new Apple range. The whole range has WiFi built in so you won't need to physically connect to a computer to download. Apart from WiFi though they don't look particularly innovative. Have Microsoft been thrown by the new look iPod Touch?

As with most Microsoft products, the Zunes integrate with Windows, both to synchronize music and to share TV programmes you may have recorded onto your computer.

It looks like Microsoft are still experimenting though - with a launch in the US in November and no UK launch date, so no competition for Apple this Christmas!

It took years for Microsoft to effectively compete with the dominant Palm, but when it did - Palm lost out. Should Apple be worried? Post your thoughts below!

August was a great month - it was good to see lots of existing members returning to the site along with a good number of new members. Once the weekend is out of the way we'll draw the winner for iPod Shuffle.

Unfortunately a few people who signed up were not entered into the competition because they didn't enter their required details in their profile!. Of course they may not have wanted to enter - so that's OK. If you want to be entered into the next draw please make sure you enter your name and phone number in your account details and ensure that you're receiving our email updates. The details you enter are only visible to us unless you decide to make them public, and we don't give any of our members details to other people unless we ask first.

We have another prize draw this month - we haven't decided what the prize is going to be yet. It'll be a surprise! Please do bear in mind the points above though if you want to take part!

We've made lots of changes here at GadgetSpeak over the last few months, including our revamped site design. Now we'd like to hear from you! There are several ways you can help us improve GadgetSpeak further :

• What do you like/don't like about GadgetSpeak?
• Any features or ideas that you'd like to see us add to the site?

Finally - are there products that you'd like us to review? Are you in the market for a new gizmo of some kind and don't know which one to choose? You're thinking of buying a widget, but not sure you believe the sales hype and an independent review would help? Just let us know! 

Use the comment area below to let us know your thoughts on the points above and help us to make GadgetSpeak more relevant to you!