I just bought a Cannon  PowerShot A570 IS as a Christmas gift for my son. It does have an image stabiliser, it works with rechargeable batteries (over 2000, preferably 2300 that's what I've been told - but I'm in Poland, we have a different electrical system). It also has all automatic settings, good autofocus (I'm thinking point-and-shoot easiness), is fairly resistant though plastic. It also has a nice LCD screen and a viewfinder and gives a variety of manual settings which is what I was looking for, hoping my son would take some interest in photography and may want to experiment later. :-D

 

Liam