Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

Need some tunes to liven up your week? You can get this Panasonic PM38EB-K hifi system for just £105 from Tesco, £28 pounds cheaper than the next best price.

All week we’ve been running Reevoo’s first ever giveaway. We’ve got one model of the extremely hard to get hold off Tesco Hifi - voted ‘Britain’s Best Hifi‘ in the recent Reevoo Customer Choice Awards.

We’ve had lots of great entries on Twitter, but we reckon the prize should go to the person who went the extra mile and sent us a picture to show us why he needed a hifi so badly.

@reevoo I need to #winahifi because I’m a poor student currently stuck with this tiny little speaker — jamesctaylor

Well James, we’re happy to be able to help out a poor student, with - brace yourself - Britain’s best-rated hifi!

And if that wasn’t enough, we’re also going to throw in a copy of the White Lies album, To Lose My Life.

James, if you let us have your address we’ll send through the hifi, and you can look forward to having to make some room on your bookshelves for this:

Look out for more Reevoo giveaways coming soon!

Reevoo’s First Giveaway

Hours after Reevoo announced that the Tesco Value MC-907 Hi-Fi had trounced the opposition in the first Reevoo Customer Awards the machine was sold out across the Country!

In an effort to prevent enormous public outcry Reevoo are giving away one copy of the glimmering gold champion of music lovers’ eardrums!

There’s a catch though. Not just anyone is worthy of the public’s favourite Hi-Fi, you’ll have to prove it truly deserves pride of place on your mantlepiece this summer, and you’re going to have to think creatively if you want to win.

At Reevoo we want the last remaining model to go to the most deserving person out there so show us how much you need the thumping bass in your life by sending us your finest picture, poem or paragraph showing and explaining why you’re truly worthy of Britain’s greatest Hi-Fi. We expect to see air guitar pictures, romantic song lyrics and at least one person brave enough to dress up like someone from The Archers.

A Hi-Fi is nothing without music so we’re giving away the new White Lies album To Lose My Life too.

How to Enter

Being big fans of all things internet we would like to invite you to use your favourite blog site or Twitter to communicate your passion for this mighty prize to us!
Just answer this simple question:

‘Why do you or someone you know deserve to win a new Hi-Fi?’

Blog entries

If you blog your entry make sure you link directly to this post at http://www.reevoo.com/decidewhattobuy/2009/05/win-britains-favourite-hi-fi

and feel free to use images to accompany your post.

Twitter

If you use Twitter begin your tweet with

@reevoo I need to #winahifi because…

By doing this we can keep track of all entrants. You can also search Twitter for #winahifi and see how you compare to the competition!

If you want to add an image to show how much you need the Hi-Fi you can use the popular Twitter image uploading service, Twitpic.

What if I’ve never used a blog or Twitter?

If you’ve never blogged or used Twitter before don’t worry, it’s easy! Simply visit Blogger to get started blogging or Twitter to start writing your own Tweets.

Closing Date

The closing date for the competition is 3pm 15/05/09. Be sure to check back on Decide What To Buy the following day to find out if you’re the lucky winner.

Please follow this link for full Terms and Conditions.

Are you in the process of re-doing your lounge? Have you just moved into your first place? For whatever reason, if you’re looking to kit out your living room but you’re a bit short of cash, you’ve come to the right place. This is the first in a series of posts about kitting out your rooms on a budget. As you might have guessed, we’re starting off with the lounge.

Everyone says the centre of a home is the kitchen but quite frankly we all spend far more time in front of the TV than the oven – unless you are a) a chef, b) a mum or c) you’ve just stepped out of the 19th century and you don’t have a TV.

So first up is the television - probably one of the most important items in your house. We’ve gone for a 32 incher as that’s the nation’s most popular size and fits in to most living rooms.

The Hitachi L32H01 is HD ready, has an LCD screen and comes in at £395. Quite reasonable and equipped with two scart sockets and two HDMI connections so you won’t be short of places to plug your consoles, DVD players and digital set top boxes into. This TV gets 9.2/10 on Reevoo. Janet, a reviewer from Derby says “It is good looking, easy to set up and use. The sound quality is excellent and it’s an expensive product at a very good price”.

Now you’ve got a TV, you’ll be needing a DVD player. We’ve gone for the Samsung DVD-R155 which is a very reasonable £104, especially as it’s a DVD recorder as well. You can also play all of your own-burned DVDs so those holiday videos can be ‘enjoyed’ over and over and over… The most popular comment left about this machine was that it was easy to use. 

If you’re worried about where to put your TV and DVD recorder, we’ve taken care of that as well.  This classy looking Alphason AP2-3/80 is £90 and scores 8.8/10. Reviewers loved the design and the fact that it was easy to build. It’s also black so it’ll match the TV and DVD player we picked out earlier.

Every lounge needs a HiFi system. The Philips MCB204 is very reasonable at £47. It has a DAB digital radio, MP3 playback and USB ports so that you can play all of your downloaded music too. Pretty good for under £50! And if you’re worried that the cheap stuff is never the best, this little machine has some cracking reviews. Check them out for yourself. 

You may already have one but if not, we’ve also picked out a cordless phone set. The Philips SE2453S/05 is £59. Included in that price are three handsets. You can store up to 100 phone numbers and you can wonder 300m from the base unit.

So there you have it. A lounge kitted out for under £700 (695 to be exact). If you already had a phone, you’re looking at £636 for some pretty decent kit.

We were thinking about adding a Nintendo Wii in there but you’d be adding £200 to your credit card and you are supposed to be on a budget after all…If you’d prefer to spend the money on a Wii and forego food for a month, you can check out Wii reviews here.