A few years ago I was watching one of those 1960s era Bass and Rankin Christmas specials on television with my son. You know the ones I’m talking about, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “The Little Drummer Boy” are both examples. They made all of the strange half puppet half animation holiday specials we see every year.

As a song featuring the activities of Santa’s Workshop played on the screen my teenage son told me how he figured out there was no Santa Claus. It was when he realized that no quaint tiny hammer wielding elf-powered toyshop was responsible for all the computerized high tech toys he found under the tree. Also technology is so easily identifiable by its brand name. Did Santa have some kind of deal Microsoft?
Electronic entertainment has changed not only Santa’s business model but also the very shape of Christmas morning. When I was a kid we more or less avoided any present that was small, flat, and square. Now in the era of the Razr phone and iPod Nano the smaller, the flatter, and the squarer, the better.

This year will be no different and the demand for game consoles and digital cameras will have retailers and wholesale electronics suppliers working hard to keep up. If you are planning to get a piece of the holiday home electronics profit pie it can be difficult to know which slice to choose, they all look so good.

Do you pick up a pallet load of Xbox 360s or aim at a more affordably priced line of cell phones? Would you do better selling mp3 players or navigational GPS systems for cars. It’s a tough question and I’m not going to help any by bringing up several items that are likely to be huge this Christmas.

A great deal of holiday joy is going to depend on the presence of Apples under the tree. There are lots and lots of mp3 players but none have the reputation for quality and cool as the various iPods. Apple has combined its long respected brand name with a high quality product to hurtle to the top of music playing technology.

There are a number of iPods with different levels of functions and the amount of memory they contain. All are built to store and replay music, video, or still images from a hard drive. The smaller versions, the iPod Shuffle and the iPod Nano, depend on flash memory to store media. By using the iTunes software users can easily listen to music on their computer, add or remove songs from their iPod and even visit the iTunes music store and purchase downloadable music.

As we approach the 2006 holiday season the prices on most styles of iPods have come down a little despite improvements in their design and high product demand. Last year at this time for example the iPod Nano with 30gb of memory was going for about $300, this year I’ve seen plenty at $250 each and occasionally a little less.

The littlest iPod of all, the Shuffle, lacks a screen of any kind and has less memory. Like its bigger cousins the Shuffle comes in two memory sizes. There is a 512mb version and a 1gb version. The larger version holds about 240 songs. Last year a Shuffle with 1gb of memory sold for about $120 and they have fallen to around about $100 a piece and frequently less.

The largest version will hold up to 15,000 songs and 25,000 photos. A 2.5-inch full color screen and the capability of holding 150 hours of video allows the consumer to watch music videos and television shows anywhere. The iPod normally retails for around $250 for the 30gb model and about $350 for the 80gb.

The biggest draw back for the small retailer hoping to sell iPods is finding wholesale supplies at prices low enough to get your prices much below those mentioned above. The demand is so great that very few are available at close out prices. They simply aren’t being closed out often.

If you come across a good wholesale electronics supplier that can get you iPods cheap you’ll have to choose between naughtily keeping it to yourself or nicely sharing it with others.

Art Micklewraith is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Wholezilla. He can be reached at Content and Solutions or by email at artmicklewraith@gmail.com.