The short version: If little helicopters interest you, buy one. They’re $20, come on.

Don’t buy the crap they sell at the mall — buy a Syma S107G. Don’t buy cheaper helis from other manufacturers. The best bang for your twenty bucks is a Syma S107.

My daughter, who is six years old, has crashlanded it in the pool, where it sunk to the bottom (and survived after I blew the water out with my compressor and let it dry overnight), stuck it on the roof where it sat for about ten hours and dropped it to the dirt from 25 feet in the air numerous times. Parts bill so far: $0.00. This thing is a tank, a submarine and a bit of a rocket. It’s not actually fast, but it hovers stably and is a joy to use.

Google Talk on my wife’s Virgin Mobile BlackBerry has been frequently telling her and her contacts that she’s online and quietly not delivering message to or from her. Restarting Google Talk app fixes this, until it recurs hours later. Could be that our Sprint network coverage at the house is spotty. Some research on my part has uncovered complaints about RIM’s Google Talk chat client fro BlackBerry.

My wife (and I didn’t twist her arm) tried a Motorola Triumph this weekend. Surprisingly, Google’s Google Chat Android client was logging her out. Not as bad as false reporting her as logged in, but still non-optimum. So I set her up with BeeJive IM and put her on the wifi at the house. I don’t remember why I changed clients, actually, but whatever.

But she can’t stand the Android keypad. And the Android 2.2 autocorrection is, in a word, completely freaking awful. I confirmed. 2.3’s autocorrection (checked on someone’s 2.3-based Nexus S) seems fine.

So she decided she’s going back to her BlackBerry.