What do you give the person who has everything? Maybe one of those devices that does everything.

The consumer-electronics industry helpfully keeps stamping out products, many with digital wireless functions "converged" within ever-smaller plastic shells. These tools flirt with weightlessness.

A palm-size tool like Handspring's Treo 600 lets users surf the Web, make calls, take pictures, play music MP3s, send e-mail, and watch videos. Throw in some dental floss and you're pretty much packed for the weekend.

Or how about - for roughly one-sixth the price, at $100 - a clunky, black, rotary-style phone, with a zinc-armored receiver that feels remarkably like a dumbbell when you jerk it from its cradle?

This year, that second purchase would make you the trendier consumer.

Don't expect any shoebox-size cellphones to emerge from the Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas. Still, as gift season peaks, retro tech is pushing to the fore. New record players, Polaroid instant cameras, and analog radio receivers that look straight out of "The Waltons" have popped up as quirky alternatives to DVD-audio, digital cameras, and that in-dash Internet radio you can pop out and dock at your desk.

Much of the throwback merchandise that consumers encounter in stores and catalogs represents a simple shift in packaging - that old-style phone, for example, handles touch-tone as well as pulse dialing. As such, the trend marks the inevitable extension of the design movement that has swept everything from teen fashion (those pants!) to automotive design (those fins!).

"People have become a little more aware of design, and the retro movement that has been going on is really about design, about interesting shapes," says Laurie Coots, chief marketing officer at advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day.

It's not that design can't be forward-looking. In recent years, color-frosted translucence has been king (thanks, iMac). But "slim, sleek, ultra-cool hip" has its limits, say Ms. Coots from her Los Angeles office.

"Our world has gotten kind of boring" in its sleekness, she says. "It's the same stuff everywhere you go."

Enter a new trio of desirable designs: interesting, kitschy - and yes, retro.

As consumers, "we're looking for a little more personality in our lives," explains Coots. "Look at the revival of the Weber grill," a simple, kettle-top cooker in an era of high-tech, steel über-grills that run to $6,000 and serve as smokers, rotisseries, and ranges.

But in some cases, the retro-tech revival also reflects a resurgence of decades-old technologies that outstrip their digital, state-of-the-art successors and are now cheaper to mass produce than they were at their inception, experts say.

It may also reflect some consumers' reluctance to buy into more functionality - more gigabytes, more megapixels, more processing speed - than they can use.

"Technologies and their applications advance with the speed of imagination," says Ralph Oliva, director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State University. "As a species, human beings are not moving that quickly.... As these technologies and their applications advance, they collide with how much we can adapt to."

Mr. Oliva is no Luddite. A former worldwide brand manager and vice president of design at Texas Instruments, he respects digital technology's capacity to produce the kind of clean, hiss-free sound that's ideal for, say, telephone transmissions. And he loves Apple's digital MP3 music player, iPod. "Have you played with one?" he asks. Its design is so intuitive, "it almost defines its own space."

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