This Isolé IDP-3050 is one smart power strip. It can detect your presence with its outboard infrared sensor. When you leave the room, it cuts power to six of its eight outlets, keeping those multi gigawatts from seeping out of countless wall warts and into energy wasteland. It can detect your presence over a 300-square-foot area, and you can adjust its cutoff threshold from 30 seconds to a half-hour.

It might be a good idea to plug a space heater and your monitor into the auto-cutoff sockets, while leaving your PC and cell phone charger plugged into one of the two non-switched outlets. We like the idea of shutting off all power to those phantom energy drainers, but wonder if the Isolé is able to reliably detect our presence. One thing's for sure: It's going to take a few years to recover the $90 cost of this thing.

Watt Stopper, via Oh Gizmo