Each week Adam Frucci takes a closer look at the latest gadget buzz in his column, Shift.

Image by Matt Krueger

Hey, it's almost Christmas! Merry Christmas to all you people who celebrate Christmas out there, and to everyone else enjoying some Chinese food and going to the movies. One thing that we can all agree on no matter what holiday we celebrate is that the end of the year makes us want stuff. Be it the horrible air of consumerism that drenches everything around us or the expectations of a looming new year on the horizon, December is certainly the month that brings out the gimme-gimmes in all of us. Well, why fight it? This week I present to you my non-denominational holiday wish list of things I'd like to see happen in 2007. Oh yeah, and peace and goodwill among men is number one on the list — this is the rest of it. Just FYI.

1. An end to super-restrictive copy protection. If someone buys a song, they should own it and be able to listen to it where and how they want it. These online stores are shooting themselves in the foot by forcing customers to use the music they buy on only a few players or limiting how often they can burn the tracks to disc. Let ownership be ownership and stop treating customers like criminals!

2. More video on demand. Cable On Demand is a great but still limited service. It's awesome for watching HBO original programming, but until the selection of movies gets larger it's just going to be a fallback for when you don't have something you really want to watch. Of course, I'd love to see a full-featured Netflix set-top box, but that might be hoping for a bit too much… at least in 2007.

3. An end to the HD-disc format war. As far as I'm concerned, both HD DVD and Blu-ray deserve to lose this costly battle, as all the companies behind the two formats brazenly brought this unnecessary war into the court of public opinion. Rather than settle on one format behind closed doors and between each other they greedily put out two formats, forcing customers to choose between two nearly identical formats. Well, screw you, greedy companies. Here's hoping both formats go down in flames.

4. More GPS-enabled cell phones. I love the idea of being able to get directions anywhere, and added functionality like the Helio Drift's buddy finder are great ways to make GPS a more sought-after feature in our mobile phones.

5. Fewer dumb USB gadgets. Let's make the end of 2006 the peak of dumb USB gadget releases. Yes, I know that USB can power things. That's great. So can a wall outlet. Let's not go crazy and release every otherwise-boring gadget as a USB gadget just to get some sales, as people aren't gonna go for it.

6. A smooth Vista launch. I'm really hoping that the imminent Windows Vista launch doesn't come with a plague of bugs, creating headaches for everyone from software developers to customer service reps. It's the first major OS launch from Microsoft in a few years, and if people suddenly have lots of trouble using their older software and peripherals it's gonna create headaches all over the place.

7. Wimax implementation. I want high-speed wireless access everywhere! I am sick of dealing with hotspots, damned sick of it. The idea of just being able to go anywhere and connect to a speedy hookup is wonderful, and as soon as Sprint gets everything set up, we have an end to fading hotspots to look forward to. — A.F.