Here are two handfuls of devices to avoid at any cost this holiday season, culled from the worst-scoring products tested by PC Magazine this year.

A new Bluetooth device turns the iPod into the ultimate remote control for a home stereo. Belkin’s TuneStage, which is slated to ship next year, serves as both the controller and the source of the music, wirelessly streaming tunes to the stereo. The device consists of a receiver that connects to a home theater system or stereo and a small transmitter that sits atop Apple Computer’s iPod music player.

Walmart.com and Linspire on Monday unveiled a Linux-based laptop priced at $498. The computer, dubbed Balance, comes loaded with the Linspire operating system and the OpenOffice.org office suite, the companies said.

Radio waves from mobile phones harm body cells and damage DNA in laboratory conditions, according to a new study majority-funded by the European Union, researchers said on Monday. The so-called Reflex study, conducted by 12 research groups in seven European countries, did not prove that mobile phones are a risk to health but concluded that more research is needed to see whether effects can also be found outside a lab.

RhinoSkin is currently holding a giveaway for a palmOne Zire 72 and a RhinoSkin aluminum hard case for the device. Complete details can be found on the RhinoSkin site, no purchase is necessary to enter.

Intellisync has expanded its mobile-carrier platform, adding new email and productivity tools for the consumer market. The San Jose, Calif., company said its goAnywhere suite now provides on-demand and push email, personal information management synchronization, device management and secure file access.

GlobeTel of Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. is preparing to launch a gigantic, floating aircraft that will hover in the stratosphere and blanket a swath of earth the size of Texas with WiFi access. The “stratellite,” as it’s called, will be enormous: a 245 ft. long by 145 ft. wide by 87 ft. tall kevlar-encased craft with solar panels to harness energy. While not technically a balloon (it doesn’t inflate), the stratellite will float from a mixture of helium and nitrogen.

DoCoMo announced that it succeeded in achieving 1Gbps in downlink packet data transmission in a laboratory experiment using fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication radio access equipment. The company employed two wireless access techniques, variable-spreading-factor spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (VSF-Spread OFDM) and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing, in the latest test.

Sprint plans to launch a new service for streaming music over the airwaves to cell phones, powered by a company that provides digital music to cable and satellite TV subscribers. Under the terms of the deal, Music Choice is providing a range of six streaming music channels organized by genre, as well as some music videos and artist interviews for Sprint subscribers who pay about $6 a month.

This story is kind of localized at the moment, but hopefully the trend will spread. WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC is now providing news, weather and other information on Sprint PCS Vision mobile phones. The new service allows Sprint PCS customers to download up-to-the-minute news stories, pictures, traffic camera images, weather forecasts, Doppler radar, and severe weather warnings to their mobile phones. The News Over Wireless “NOW” application was designed for WRAL by sister company, DTV Plus, with wireless application expertise from Air2Web.