TV chef Alton Brown has it right: Unitaskers – specialty devices that only perform one function – have no place in the kitchen. And single-purpose gadgets have no place in your pocket. The same way lemon zesters to garlic presses clutter up kitchen drawers and cabinets, electronic voice recorders and standalone CD players fill up your briefcase and entertainment center without ever justifying their existence in more than one very limited way. Though we may make exceptions for purebred machines that far outperform their all-in-one counterparts, most gadgets need to earn their keep in a multitude of ways. Here are 10 of our favorite do-it-all devices.

Once a down-and-out contender in the world of video games, the PlayStation 3 has shown itself to be far more popular as a home theater machine, and after the $100 price drop that came with the new slim version, you could call it a bargain, too. Besides serving up video games in the daytime hours, it doubles as Blu-ray player at night, and with an active Internet connection, you can rent and buy movies online from Sony, stream your movie collection from a networked computer, and even surf the Web with the built-in browser.

Apple iPhone 3GS 16GB$200 with contract from AT&T

Smartphones all pull double and triple duty as do-it-all devices, but Apple’s iPhone stands out as leader of the pack when it comes to sheer flexibility. Right out of the box, it serves as a phone, Internet browser, GPS navigator, and personal media player. Add in 85,000 apps and counting from the overflowing App Store – many of which are free or extremely cheap – and the iPhone becomes a gaming platform, tip calculator, song identifier, cookbook, sonar ruler, restaurant finder, portable TV, and whatever else the hive mind of thousands of creative geeks dreams up.

Digital photo frames make a clever way to get your pictures off memory cards and into the living room, but with a little bit of extra hardware, they can perform a lot of extra tricks, too. HP’s DreamScreen rolls with other premium photo frames by displaying photos directly from SD cards and online sites like Snapfish and Facebook, but also goes a step further. It will play music from Pandora and HP SmartRadio, play movies, display a five-day weather forecast, and even act as an alarm clock, with your favorite music as the wakeup call.

Yes, all computers make good multitaskers, but a unique combination of low prices and portability make netbooks even more versatile. Lenovo’s S12 gets our vote as one of the finest because of the 12-inch screen, which we consider the bare minimum for a notebook you can use every day – not just in travel situations. And a new version that will sport Nvidia’s Ion graphics processor will retail for only $50 more when it launches in late October, but give it enough grunt for light gaming and even 1080p video playback, making it a potential HTPC candidate.

Why bother buying a Bluetooth headset in addition to wireless earphones when you can just get one product that serves as both? Sony Ericsson’s IS800 fits that bill by offering the A2DP Bluetooth profile for high-quality uncompressed sound, plus a built-in mic for use as a headset. Used in conjunction with a smartphone that’s also a PMP, it’s truly one headset to rule them all.

To keep your arsenal of gadgets juiced up and powered on the road, you can send keep a rat’s nest of different specialty chargers in the glove box, or just this handy inverter, which lets you use the same home chargers that came with the device. Not only will it convert your car’s standard 12V DC power supply to 120V AC for electronics like laptops, it also offers dual USB ports for all those gadgets with USB charging cables (these days, just about all of them).

It’s hard to recommend a standalone printer when all-in-one machines have gotten this good – and inexpensive. HP’s Officejet J3680 acts as a standalone office army by handling printing, faxing, copying and scanning, all from one machine. There’s even a built-in phone for impromptu calls from your fax line. Until the world finally abandons the fax machine, it’s one affordable way to stay tapped into 30-year-old tech without hanging on to more junker in the closet.

Whether you spend your afternoons in college lecture halls or board rooms, you probably need to carry a pen anyway, so you might as well carry one that does more than just feed out ink. Livescribe’s Pulse is more like a computer in a pen. It records everything you write on paper in digital form using an infrared camera, along with capturing simultaneous audio notes with a built-in mic. At a later point, you can play back the audio by tapping on different things you’ve written, or even download the audio and notes to a PC via a USB connection, and convert the handwritten notes to digital text with aftermarket software. Excessive? Maybe, but the extra notes will go a long way from a shelf full of dog-eared spiral-bound notebooks when it’s time to cram for an exam, or remember exactly what your boss wanted you to do by Tuesday

We loved the Flip Mino HD, Kodak Zi6, and Creative Vado HD, but all these mini HD camcorders have one problem: They don’t do anything besides shoot YouTube-caliber gag reels. Fortunately, the last new crop of point-and-shoot cameras brought us plenty of models that shoot 720p video alongside taking stellar still shots. Canon’s SX200IS also captures HD-quality video in a compact package, but brings big-boy features like a 12-megapixel sensor, 12x zoom and optical image stabilization to the game.

Struggling to find enough place around your car’s cramped dashboard for a head unit, movie screen, and GPS? Get rid of the mobile-command-center look by rolling them into one device with Pioneer’s ludicriously spendy AVIC-X710BT. It offers turn-by-turn voice-guided GPS navigation, iPod connectivity, Bluetooth connectivity for integrating your cell phone into your stereo system, USB and SD card slots, MP3, WMA, WAV, and iTunes AAC playback. Just remember to keep your eyes on the road, OK?

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