The Place To Be This Black Friday:

Home, in your fuzzy slippers.

Here’s the deal; there’s this thing called the interwebs, and you can get great deals with just the click of a button in the comfort of your own home, wearing your PJ’s and fuzzy slippers, no less.

All while chewing on a leftover drumstick.

It’s amazing!

Or, you can stand outside all night in the freezing cold, only to take part in an out of control stampede for a couple of loss leader items.

Hmmm…

Seriously, Cyber Monday has been slowly spreading its wings, and the online deals are now available as early as Thanksgiving Day, just like in the brick and mortar stores.

We’ve gotten some tremendous deals online the last few Black Fridays, and the one time in recent memory we ventured out, it was to Paul’s TV inside Jordan’s Furniture. Great TV, great price, no lines, and the new TV and stand were delivered and set up, for free, before the day was done. Nice

So, if you can’t stay home, pick your spots.

That is all.

Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS

With Black Friday looming large and the holidays following close behind, its time to roll out some gift ideas that are guaranteed to put a smile on the face of that special geek or geekette in your life. First up is the Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS.

This is a great little point and shoot camera; small, solidly built, and chock full of features. The 300 is a 12.1 megapixel digital camera with a 24 mm ultra Wide-Angle lens, 5x optical zoom, full 1080p HD video with stereo sound, and an optical image stabilizer. Canon’s HS system provides fast image processing and great low light performance, and it can capture 8.0 frames per second in high speed burst mode. Not bad for a camera you can slip into your front pocket.

I’ve been playing around with one of these for about 2 months now, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. Nice sharp photos, short time between shots, very decent battery life, and although it’s capable of all kinds of magical image processing, the thing I’m most impressed with is its Smart Auto setting. It reads the situation and adjusts accordingly, giving you the best picture possible with a minimal amount of effort. Just point, and shoot; as it should be.

That being said, I’m looking forward to trying out the Movie Digest mode this Thanksgiving. In this mode, the camera pre-captures a 4 second video clip before each still, and then stitches the whole day together in a file that you can play back as a montage. Cool.

There’s a nice review here on the Hunt’s Camera website, and I’ve posted a video review from infoSync below, because the only way to appreciate how tiny this thing is is to see it in someone’s hands. It’s tiny, but it’s solid. There’s a nice heft to it in your hand, and when it’s off, it turtles itself into a sleek, sturdy little package.

Hunt’s just dropped the price from $199 to $179, and I’m expecting them to bundle it with an extra battery or a nice memory card and case for the same or less this Friday. If they do, jump on it, you won’t be disappointed.

Happy Black Friday!

One of the best things about the Thanksgiving holiday for me is Black Friday, but not for the reasons you’d think.

I love it because it’s one of the few days each year when we have the day off and nothing pressing on our agendas. The day is usually ours to squander as we see fit, and that is a very rare commodity these days.

Our ideal Black Friday involves sleeping in, followed by lounging in our PJ’s, consuming mass quantities of coffee, and pondering the eternal question; “Is it too early to start on those leftover desserts?” The answer, my friends, is that it’s never too early.

What I don’t like about Black Friday is fighting the crowds at the malls and the big box stores in search of bargains. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. Although there are some great bargains out there, the really good ones (like $179 laptops) are always in short supply, and you need to be in line on Thanksgiving Day just to be a contender when the store opens on Friday. No thanks.

It’s not worth it to me to miss out on Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family and the annual after Thanksgiving slouch fest, just to get a good deal on some material item. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I can afford to pass up any bargains, it’s just that we’ve found out that: A) The downtime is more important to us, and B) A lot of the deals are available online.

Last year we were in need of some Apple products for the holidays, so I thought I'd check out their Black Friday sale and maybe save a little coin. Apple loves to shroud their events in secrecy, and this one was no different. They sent out an email a few days before the holiday that said to check out their website on Friday morning for great deals, so when we awoke, fashionably late, we got on line and found that there was indeed a substantial savings on quite a few items.

Being as it was already late, I called our local Apple retail store to see if the lines were out the door. I found out that they weren’t, but I also found out that the Apple store won't give you a corporate discount along with the Black Friday sale price. That was a bit of a bummer, but the sale prices were still good enough to make us want to saddle up and head down there. That’s when the very helpful sales associate suggested that we log in to the Apple site through our discount program and see if we could get our discount and the sale price that way.

Guess what? We could!

I should have tried to purchase it online right from the get go, but I had some preconceived notion that the best deals could only be had in person. Boy, was I wrong. We ended up getting some great deals, plus the shipping was free. Major items coming directly from Apple (like Macs and iPods) arrive very quickly, usually in just 2-3 days, even if they need to be engraved. By the way, my iPod has “Stayed home on Black Friday and still got this cheaper than you!” on the back.

So, it seems that in this weakened economy Cyber Monday has now become Cyber Weekend for most online merchants, and that’s good with me. Don’t spread it around too much though, I still like to see those shots on the news of the people in line outside of the malls, wrapped up in parkas and trash bags, waiting for the hunt to begin. Now that’s entertainment.

Ooh, gotta go. The news is coming on again!

Update, Sleepy Saturday

Yes, both Apple's website and their stores had the lower prices on Friday (which seem to have returned to normal today), and while you could get the lower prices in the stores, they wouldn't allow you to combine any corporate discounts with the sale prices. The Apple web site however, did. If you logged in to Apple using your corporate discount credentials yesterday, the site gave you your discount on top of the sale prices, plus free shipping. Not bad.

Thanks Apple, way to stimulate that old economy! Although it may work better next time if you tell somebody...

Note: Macmall still has the sale prices through Cyber Monday.

Black Friday Deals From Apple?

I’ve been scouring the web looking for Black Friday deals this year, and pickings have been kind of slim, but one item has caught my attention. Rumors abound that Apple stores will match any authorized resellers price on Apple products. Here’s a link to an article on the ifoapplestore.com site.

This is good news as Best Buy, Amazon, and Macmall are all offering substantial savings on Macs and iPods. Macmall is advertising the 2nd gen 16GB touch for $269 and the 2nd gen 8GB for $209, as well as great prices on iMacs and MacBooks.

Be sure you have proof of competitor pricing, and if you’re shopping at Best Buy, be aware that their best deals on the 16GB Touch ($249) is for a 1st gen unit (2nd gen $299). There’s a big difference between the 1st and 2nd gen models.

Apple retailers will be opening at 5am on Friday. No pushing and shoving please.