NES games console
Gareth Beavis, phones and tablets editor
My best ever gadget was the first ever Nintendo console. The NES. The greatest day in my childhood.
It came with the Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt combo, and even had the light gun. I played it all day long, switching between the games, and quickly became adept at puffing air on the cartridge to make it work.
In a way I've never hit those heights again - subsequent games and even consoles never matched up to that joy. I'd liken it the way the first astronauts felt, knowing that the rush could never be repeated, as adulthood has wiped away all vestiges of my childlike wonder.
Motorola T180
John McCann, phones and tablets deputy editor
Let's travel back to 2000. All my friends (and even my dad) have the Nokia 3210 and are rubbing it in my spotty, pubescent face. Since school started in September it's been a constant barrage of abuse, but come December 25 I have my revenge... wait... what's this?
A Motorola T180. Crap. This isn't a Nokia.
That aside, the T180 will always have a special place in my heart. It was my first mobile phone and kick started a love affair which landed me a killer job.
Sega Saturn
Kane Fulton, computing editor
A couple of years ago I bought an Xbox One for myself to unwrap on Christmas day and it evoked memories of when I last took the wrappings off a festive console - an unexpected Sega Saturn with Bug!, Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter inside the box. A Commodore Amiga gamer at the time, I was spellbound by the Saturn's polygon-driven graphics and arcade thrills. I hope Microsoft can emulate that magic on December 25.
Nintendo Game Boy
Hugh Langley, associate editor
For me, it was opening my original Game Boy on Christmas morning – it set the bar to unrepeatable high. I don't remember anything else about that Christmas so I can only assume I was too buried in Super Mario Land to eat or speak to anyone for the rest of the week. It wasn't so much the games that excited me but the idea of being able to play them on the move. Sure, opening my Motorola V550 years later was good too, but I couldn't play Pokemon, could I?
Elite for BBC Micro
Duncan Bell, wearables and lifestyle editor
The BBC Micro was the computer that middle class parents bought their kids in the 80s, because it had a patina of educational respectability to it, like something from The Happy Shop of Edu-Taining Arse-suckery. Because my parents were cruel and useless - barely a half step above child-abusing murderers, really - I got saddled with one and hence could not play any of the games that my friends had on their proper home computers, and could only counter their Jet Set Willy, California Games and OutRun with games called things like 'Large, Slow-Moving Square Graphic Attack' and 'Not-Licensed-From-A-Cool-Movie Wars'.
All that changed with Elite, which set you loose on an infinite universe to kill wire-frame pirates whilst selling gold, food and narcotics in order to purchase better weapons, to kill more pirates. I got it for Christmas in 1984 and literally did not leave my bedroom for the next six months, whilst ascending to 'Deadly' status, one below the ultimate goal of becoming an 'Elite'-grade homicidal space maniac. Interestingly, as I had the version on cassette rather than floppy disk, which had better weapons and some special missions that helped you rank up more rapidly, becoming Elite was all but impossible. This was because my parents had not invested in a floppy drive, due to their aforementioned cruelty and uselessness.
iPod Nano
James Peckham, phone and tablet writer
Before I got my iPod Nano in the winter of 2006, I'd been doing silent paper rounds for almost 2 months. I had broken the cheap knock off MP3 player I'd bought from my local ASDA and had to put up with an old CD player and a few disks for company.
Then that Christmas, the second generation iPod Nano was waiting for me under the Christmas tree. It my first experience of an Apple product and meant I could download anything I wanted from the then mythical iTunes. Plus I could have even more than three albums on its then impressive 2GB of storage.
