-As you shop this holiday season, avoid the duds and head for the high tech gifts that are just plain cool.
Here are our favorites: for the young and young at heart, the Lego Mindstorms EV3 adds new features to everyone's favorite building blocks, allowing you to construct fairly sophisticated robots.
-Educationalized, these toys are great for learning to program, learning mechanics.
-At $350, it is pricey.
But a screaming solo and a guitar made entirely
-of Legos is priceless.
Know a traveler who's tired of pecking at a tiny keyboard on their smartphone?
The $100 virtual keyboard connects to your phone via bluetooth and uses lasers to project a full-size QWERTY keyboard onto any flat surface.
-Hello.
-Hello!
-The new Philip serves as a strip down cellphone of sorts in wristwatch form.
The $200 device lets parents track their kids' location with the accompanying app.
Kids gonna also use the Philip to make and receive calls
-but only from specific numbers in their contacts list.
For the tech fanatics on your list, the $80 Leap Motion controller offers a completely new way to interact with your computer.
Forgo your mouse and keyboard and use your fingers to play puppeteer or get a science lesson.
-From a learning standpoint, this is a type of thing that gives you incredible detail, incredible control and then uses your hand when it's appropriate or uses the keyboard when it's appropriate, so you really get that augmented experience.
-Cooks will appreciate Click & Grow.
These $80 smart
planters take all the guess work out of when to your water your fresh herbs.
Fill up the water tank, power up the planter and in a couple of weeks you should see sprouts.
There's also an optional grow light to help in the winter months when there's less natural light available.
For more suggestions, head to CNET.com and click on the Holiday Gift Guide.
In San Francisco, I'm Sumi Das.
CNET for CBS news.
