Looking for a great Secret Santa gift for a techy friend or family member? Here are 12 gifts under $50 that are fun, useful, and built to last.
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The holiday season is ramping up and that means it’s time to start shopping for gifts. Typically, a lot of folks wait for sales days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. That’s well and good, as both days have excellent sales, but stuff is going to go on sale throughout November and December anyway, so why not get started sooner? There are plenty of neat items that don’t even cost a lot that you can buy right now and be prepared.
The most difficult product category to shop for is inexpensive items. There are so many things below $50 that it’s challenging to find a good quality gift that won’t break down or fail within a couple of years. Plus, retail websites are inundated with the same products that are just rebranded a bunch of different times. For example, these Bluetooth speaker alarm clocks from Gallstep, Aisuo, and Hetyre are all the same product, just with different branding. The market is flooded with these copycat products, and it doesn’t make shopping any easier.
So, here is a list of items for under $50 that should appease the gadget lover in your life. These are great as stocking stuffers, secret Santa gifts, and some of them are even good for kids. These gift ideas are also functional, so whoever receives them should be able to actually use them — hopefully for a good, long time. How we chose
Regarding initial selections, the biggest thing was avoiding cheap knockoffs. There are a lot of highly disposable tech-oriented gifts that simply don’t work well or promise more than they can deliver. For instance, a night light with a Bluetooth speaker doesn’t sound like a bad idea. However, at roughly $20 to $30, the light probably won’t be very bright or customizable, and the speaker is probably going to sound less than ideal. To avoid that, this list is full of items that not only work well but also make sense within their price tags. A Bluetooth tracker, for example, shouldn’t cost more than $50 for a top-tier model. Luckily, they don’t, so on the list they went.
Once we had a good list of items to choose from, it was just a matter of vetting out the bad ideas and products that might not be as good as others. For this, we referenced a whole bunch of online reviews. They include professional reviews where available, user reviews on retail websites, and Reddit reviews. We also ran every product through FakeSpot to ensure that the reviews weren’t being doctored too heavily to where the user reviews became unreliable.
Finally, there is an element of personal experience. We are tech bloggers around these parts, which means we’ve either reviewed these products before, used tech from the same company, or have experience with similar tech in the same category. We know what makes things good, at least in the right context, so that helped us decide as well. A Bluetooth tracker
A Bluetooth tracker is a good, simple gift that almost anyone can use. There are several brands in the category, but they all work mostly the same way — by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. From there, you can activate them from an app on your phone and they’ll help you find whatever they’re connected to. A good example of this is the Tile Mate. You can put it on your keychain and then activate it if you ever lose your keys to help you find them again.
There are three main products that we recommend. The first is Tile. There are several different varieties, and they work on iOS and Android. Meanwhile, for iOS owners, the Apple AirTag is the obvious choice. Samsung Galaxy owners will get the most functionality out of the Galaxy SmartTag2. All three Bluetooth trackers work the same way, where you can ring them if you’ve lost something. They also all have a tracking network where you can find your stuff far away by pinging it off of other people’s smartphones. We recommend gifting a tracker to someone based on what kind of phone they have for the best results.
You can find the Tile Mate on Amazon along with the Samsung Galaxy SmartTag 2 and the Apple AirTag. All three trackers typically go for under $30, making them all inexpensive and accessible gifts, especially for that one friend who loses things all the time. A smart speaker
A smart speaker is another excellent choice for a gift. Some of them, including the Amazon Echo Dot and the Google Nest Mini, are under $50. Unfortunately, only Google and Amazon have sub-$50 products in this space. The Apple HomePod Mini – which is the cheapest product in the Apple HomePod line — is $100. Fortunately, Alexa and Google Assistant are excellent. While they might be less expensive, both Google and Amazon’s speakers are quite good.
Much like Bluetooth trackers, your best bet is to purchase the one that best fits the giftee’s life. If they have a bunch of products compatible with Alexa, then you should get them the Echo Dot, whereas folks with tons of Google stuff would benefit most from a Nest Mini. Otherwise, the two share a very similar set of features, even if you have to activate them in different ways.
The Google Nest Mini is $49.95 on Amazon, while the Amazon Echo Dot is $49.99. However, both speakers go on sale consistently over the course of the holidays, so if those links don’t show them on sale, just wait a week or two, and they’ll most likely go down eventually. Sphero Mini Golf
The Sphero Mini Golf is an app-programmable robot golf ball. It’s intended as a kid’s toy, although some functions are pretty fun for adults, too. At its core, it’s a fun little toy that you can control from an app. So, for example, let’s say you drop this thing on a mini golf course. You can use the app to make the ball roll toward the hole without actually touching the ball. For the record, this thing is a gyroscopic ball inside of a golf ball shell, so please don’t actually hit it with a golf club — it’ll break.
The real fun comes when you use your imagination. A good example is a child constructing their own little mini course at home and then trying to get the ball to roll through the course without knocking anything down. The app also has a few different drive modes that let you control the ball in various ways, similar to the company’s other well-known product that we’ve previously given a positive review, the BB-8 by Sphero.
