GADGETS OF THE WEEK

Walkie-talkies have long been an alternative to cellphones for keeping in touch with family members and fellow adventurers on camping trips or Disney World jaunts - and without burning monthly minutes or suffering from lack of signal coverage. Motorola's new Talkabout T9580RSAME two-way radios take communication even further by broadcasting emergency alerts through the handset as well.

The radios use Specific Area Message Encoding, or SAME, technology to monitor for hurricane, blizzard, flood and other announcements from the National Weather Service that are specific to the local area.

The Talkabout handset gives a visual and audio warning when an alert is in effect.

The radios go on sale next month for $90 a pair; full details will be available at www.hellomoto.com. Under the best weather and terrain conditions, the Talkabouts offer a range of 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, between handsets for personal chatting. For those times when there are no electrical outlets around to recharge the batteries, the radios can switch over to regular AA cells for power.

Relive treks with tiny GPS tracker

Hansel and Gretel may have had breadcrumbs, but this is the 21st century. There is no reason to resort to baked goods to keep track of your path through the woods. The Trackstick II is a tiny GPS tracker that can record your wanderings for weeks at a time.

The TrackStick looks like a USB thumb drive and contains a GPS receiver and two AAA batteries. The device picks up signals from satellites orbiting the Earth to find your current position and then stores your coordinates over time. When you are back home, you can connect the TrackStick to a Windows PC and review your journey in Google Earth or a similar mapping program.

The $180 device can last for up to two weeks on one set of batteries. It stores location points in a megabyte of flash memory and can take a reading on your position every five seconds. Dealer information is at www.trackstick.com.

Exercise fanatics can use the device to plan routes and measure runs, while travelers - apart from Hansel and Gretel, perhaps - can enjoy using it to relive their journeys.

A guitar toy that could please adults

There are no strings to break on the $70 Power Tour Electric Guitar from Hasbro, coming next month in stores or at www.hasbro.com/tiger. Instead, your fingers glide on a glassy, light-up fret board that picks up the electrical capacitance of your fingers - not unlike your computer touch-pad - to sense the pitch. Strums are detected by sensors that track your thumb speed and direction, and you can shake the guitar to bend a note. An onboard speaker sounds fair, but you can use headphones, plus Hasbro is releasing a $50 Power Tour Amp. Regular speakers provided mixed results.

You can toggle between free play or tutorial modes, where you can learn the 12 onboard songs, a few bars at a time while the guitar judges your progress, a bit harshly with either boos or cheers. The idea of applying these technologies to a pint-size guitar came from Steve Unruh of Hasbro. Unruh is an electrical engineer, former educator and avid guitarist who can play the hardest song, “Frankenstein” by Edgar Winter, on this very guitar. Not bad for a toy.