Since your college days, you may be stuck on Dove, Lever or other name brands. As men, we have pretty simple requirements for our bar soap– we rub it on us, it smells okay, it keeps us clean. There is another level to cleanliness, however. Grooming on its own can be an art, and we don’t have to feel like Metrosexuals to keep ourselves progressively clean. Our friends at Thymes are a paramount example of this. Their all-vegetable Azur soap not only cleans, but provides a scent you won’t find from most over-the-counter colognes. Instead of spraying on a cliched cologne, Thymes soaps provide a cool, masculine scent that will curl your lady’s toes in no time. Its time you consider a grooming upgrade, and Thymes Azur line is the ideal start.

Buy (bar soap): $12

Buy (body water): $32

The USB flash drive has taken mobile media storage in a surprising direction. Where the floppies, CDs and tape drives of yesteryear were all about business, the USB flash drive has become an art form in and of itself. USB flash drives have been integrated into jewelry, into action figures, even into little puppies that hump your laptop when plugged in. While the latter shows how absurd this art has become, we’d like to share just how sexy and stylish USB flash drives can be. A small company based in Germany, Thalbach Design Manufaktur, sells hand-crafted, hand-engraved wooden USB drives with up to 4GB of storage. Using a variety of woods and polishes, Thalbach provides a signature spin on your personal data storage.

Continue reading for an in-depth look at these unique USB drives– and stick around GearCravers, we’ll be giving away 4 free USB drives from our friends at Thalbach in a post later on today.

Following up our post on the sweet Lasonic iPod boombox, we spotted these “Boombags”, gearhead messenger bags with a twist. The NGC DJ Mixer Boombag features a print with two turntables and a dj mixer, the NGC Tape Deck Boombag shows reel-to-reel analog tape. Oh, but it gets better. Both bags include an FM receiver, ipod jack and a set of speakers subtly embedded into the gear print. You can plug your iPod right into these babies and have yourself a classic boombox on your shoulder. Very cool design, sweet idea from NGC.

Buy (DJ Mixer): $40

Buy (Tape Deck): $40

The mobile stereo, the “boombox”, the “ghettoblaster”– was as much a part of the 1980s as dayglo, greed and good hip hop. Fast forward to modern day, and the ghettoblaster is now a collectors item, sought after by a small subculture of vintage hip hop purists. While the ghettoblaster was a piece of technology that died with the boom of the Sony Walkman and Crack Cocaine, it has been reborn and updated to the iPod generation by the brilliant people at Lasonic. Their generically titled “High Performance Portable Music System” looks like the classic street boombox, but its design may have been a mistake. The Chinese designed Lasonic system is not intended to be a salute to vintage boomboxes, but an actual modern take on consumer audio. While it may have been a mistake that the designers were still stuck in the 80s, its no mistake that the Lasonic iPod BoomBox is ultracool, vintage ghettoblaster magic. If you’re a fan of classic hip hop, Lasonic just inadvertently designed your ultimate iPod dock. Represent.

Buy: $219

Its time to ditch your compact digital and think about an upgrade. When it comes to digital photography, most photographers will tell you there’s nothing better than a Nikon. And for Nikon, there’s nothing better than the Nikon D300 Digital SLR. SLRs take a little skill than your point-and-shoot compact. They have a wide array of controls, interchangeable lenses, expanded mount modularity and plenty of other pro features.  The Nikon D300, Nikon’s flagship, offers 12.3 megapixels, a 3 inch LCD display and the standard connectivity you’d expect from a high end digital camera.  Keep in mind that the megapixel number is not a yardstick of quality, as the grade of components, lenses and pre-storage processing have the greatest impact on image quality.  With that, you’ll find the D300 as the ultimate upgrade into a pro digital camera.

Buy: $2,240

Add GearCrave to the GTA IV love fest.  Your humble GearCrave editor waited outside of our local game stop at midnight last night for one of the very first copies of Grand Theft Auto IV.  Departing the scene felt a little like a pre game celebration on its own.  I found myself running to my car, hitting the gas the second the engine turned over, and praying that there would be no cops on my speeding path home.  It wasn’t long until that process was repeated, but in game.  Take it from us: Grand Theft Auto IV is likely the most incredible game we’ve played to date.  Sure, we’re only a few hours in, but we can say with confidence that we’ve never seen such an immersive, graphically intense, interactive open environment in a game before GTA IV.  Its fun, its really, really fun.

Its also likely now on its way out of stock.  Not at Amazon, fortunately.  You’re going to want to avoid the game store run-around (which we dealt with), so as always– Amazon is your best bet.

Buy (360): $59.99

Buy (PS3): $59.99

There’s nothing more dejecting than burning toast. Your eggs come out too runny? No one’s perfect. Pancakes are too crispy? It happens. Burn your toast? Give up on life (or at least the rest of your day). According to the culinary laws of physics, toast is theoretically idiot-proof. It’s supposed to be the one sure thing in one’s breakfast. But, sometimes, the toaster hates you. And, then what’re supposed to do? No one likes black toast. If you eat it, every nasty bite reminds you how much you suck. Throw it out, and now you’re incompetent and wasteful. Fortunately, Aussie appliance company Breville understands how you feel. Okay maybe it’s just me, but their Die-Cast 2-Slice Toaster BTA820XL, a.k.a. the Smart Toaster is the Lebron James of toasters. First off it’s beautiful– a full metal body, slick buttons, and a futuristic blue LED browning indicator that doubles as a countdown timer. But it’s real coolness is in its brains. Not only does it have a one-touch auto lowering system but it also boasts a one-of-a-kind ‘Lift & Look’ feature that actually raises the bread carriage mid-cycle to let you peep your toast’s doneness without resetting the timer. If after the cycle finishes, it needs just a bit more time, there’s actually has a feature called the ‘A Bit More’ function to lower the toast and give it just that. The browning control has a 5 levels and can be adjusted mid-cycle as well. Now, you just have to ask yourself if you’re ready for a toaster that’s smarter than you?

Buy: $129

Celestron’s VistaPix 8×22 model puts the cool back in binoculars. The magnifying tool has long been clunky and burdensome, but the folks at Celestron have designed this lightweight (11 oz) model for easy mobility. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a built-in FM radio and best of all, a 3 megapixel digital camera lens. Now you can take great pictures of anything you spy. They even thought of putting a flip-up LCD screen, so you can easily preview your image. The binoculars’ zoom reaches 8x, but combined with the LCD screen’s 6x zoom, there’s an insane potential for 48x zoom. Spying falling stars (or whatever else you’re into) has never been easier.

Buy: About $250.

The dilemma with laptops is that their most coveted attributes– affordability and portability– are priced almost exclusively in inverse relation to one another. But, while Apple seems intent on pioneering the first laptop to both fold into an actual piece of notebook paper and cost a million dollars, alternative PC companies like Asus and Wal-Mart-sold Everex are leading a new trend in the market: the bargain laptop. Both the Asus Eee PC and its kindred competitor, the Everex CloudBook start at $399. But while the CloudBook has beefier specs and, thus, markets itself as a cheaper, primary-laptop alternative to mainstream brands, the Asus is built more as a second laptop, a more portable compliment to the workhorse you already own. That is to say, in addition to a very stylish design, what’s most appealing about the Eee PC, rather counterintuitively, is what it doesn’t have.

The philosophy behind the Eee is: no extra muscle means no extra weight. It’s essentially a micro laptop. Ideal for a quick business trip, a sunny vacation or a crowded subway commute, it has everything you need and nothing you don’t. Weighing in at just 2lbs., it sports a 7-inch LCD screen, a modest but very capable 512 MB of RAM, built-in wireless LAN, and a frequent-flier-friendly 3.5-hour battery. But, like you, it’s not all business; it also has a built-in webcam and microphone, with pre-loaded Linux* software for webchat capabilities. The drawbacks are obvious ones. Word is that the keyboard can feel cramped at times, and it only comes in 2 ipod-nano-like hard drive sizes– 4GB and 8GB. But, its extreme lack of added weight and cool looks (in titanium silver or clean white) more than compensate. And, even if you have to bring an external hard drive along, your net weight is still well under that of the MacBook Pro (5.6 lbs) you left at home. On top of all that, the Asus Eee PC is 100% guaranteed to make you look and feel like an international spy/professional hacker-for-hire (think Ving Rhames in Mission Impossible.)

*The Eee PC is also compatible with Windows

Buy: $399

We don’t know what was better– the viral marketing hype behind JJ Abrams’ “Cloverfield”, or the film itself. That’s not to say the film itself didn’t deliver, but this film’s viral marketing campaign had the blogosphere abuzz with giddy excitement.  The film “Cloverfield” gave fans exactly what they were expecting– a larger than life monster film viewed from the eyes (and camcorders) of its victims.  If the Blair Witch had a love child with Godzilla, “Cloverfield” would be their monstrous child.  Fans of the movie will be excited to know that Cloverfield was released today on DVD.  (other noteable releases: Charlie Wilson’s War and The Savages.)

Buy: $15.99