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This Mobile Device Only Does Email — Perfectly

Not every gadget needs a carnival of features. Take the Peek, which tackles just a single task: mobile email. No phone, no browser, no camera—and no apologies. It won't satisfy convergence-rabid smartphone fetishists, but for the rest of the world (i.e., the majority of it), this one-trick pony is a godsend. In terms of looks, its slim profile stands up to the big boys. But the real treat is the interface. Instead of forcing you to wrestle with laborious setup menus, the Peek asks for a name, email address, and password. That's it. Message from your Comcast.net account? Done. Gmail, Hotmail, and other webmail accounts? No sweat. Peek has an army of techies behind the curtain to handle the digital diplomacy that makes their device work flawlessly with every major email purveyor — and quite a few minor ones. It runs on T-Mobile's massive cellular network, so even the most itinerant technophobe can use it on the go. —Terrence Russell

$100, plus $20/month

Sleek Sony Cam Shows Off Family Photos on the Spot

Face it: No one checks your Flickr page. The only time friends see your photos is when you whip out the old digicam and cruise through whatever happens to be stored on it. The crafty folks at Sony know this, which is why they made the Cyber-shot DSC-T700, a pocket snapper that's as adept at displaying images as it is at capturing them. Just 0.7-inch thick, the sleek case incorporates a 10.1-MP sensor and Carl Zeiss lens, giving pictures a crispness rarely found in compact cameras. Flip it over and you'll find that the back is literally all display — a 3.5-inch, 16:9 touchscreen that replaces every hard button except Review, Zoom, Power, and Shutter. But this rig's beauty goes way beyond the surface: 4 gigs of onboard memory hold up to 950 hi-res shots. So enough with the uploading. Quit spamming the world with links to 40 shots of your lunch and start bragging with this. —John Mahoney

$400

Stage a Water-Cooler Ambush With Pump-Action Nerf Blaster

Workplace warlords must master a complex arsenal — the preemptive status report, the perfectly timed personal day, the BCC. And ever since Nerf released its N-Strike line of "toys" in 2002, we've had one more: the foam bullet, expertly aimed at your coworker's concentration-furrowed brow. For the serious open-plan warrior, there's no better weapon than the Recon CS-6. This pump-action blaster comes outfitted with a shoulder stock and a red-dot sight for cubicle sniping. Should you get caught in a watercooler ambush, the CS-6's six-shot magazine staves off the dreaded hollow click. But if you're going under cover, you'll need a sidearm you can conceal behind a manila folder. No problem, because the Recon is a transformer. Remove the stock and barrel extender and it becomes a stealthy Nerf pistol. Keep one in your desk drawer and those hooligans from accounting will never even look at your parking space again. —Cliff Kuang

$20

Commute-Friendly Electric Cycle Does 0 to 30 in 3.8 Seconds

The electric vehicle is a cool idea too often poorly executed. Today's batteries don't have the oomph or range to be practical — unless you drop 100 grand for a Tesla. That's why Brammo's gearheads started with motorcycles. They're so light that even readily available batteries can make one commute-worthy. The 285-pound Enertia is proof of that. At its heart is a lithium-iron-phosphate power cell designed to be as safe as it is efficient. "A plasma fire is not something we want to see," company founder Craig Bramscher says. The Enertia charges in just over three hours and is good for 45 miles. The 13-kW motor silently propels the electro-cycle to 30 mph in 3.8 seconds — quick enough to beat that cab away from the light — and to a top speed of 53 mph. Brammo hasn't created a highway-ready monster (yet), but Bramscher takes heart in what his creation can do: The electric motor's instantaneous torque is perfect for wheelies. —Chuck Squatriglia

$15,000

3-D-Ready HDTV Uses Laser Light to Double Color Range, Save Energy

Mama always told you not to stare into the sun. She might have added lasers to the list of no-nos — looking directly at the concentrated beams can burn your retinas. So who'd have thought they'd make an ideal light source for televisions? Mitsubishi's 65-inch LaserVue taps this tech to produce an astonishingly vivid picture. The rear-projection set's color range is twice as broad as a typical HDTV's, yet it consumes 33 percent less energy than a similar-size LCD. Though this 3-D-ready TV may seem straight outta Solaris, you don't need to fear its newness; unlike most nascent technologies, lasers have stamina. The company claims they'll never need replacing. So go ahead and screen those Lost DVDs 24/7. Or if you're feeling reckless, fire up your Blu-ray player to savor Angelina in all her Beowulfian glory. Kind of like staring at the naked sun, only hotter. —Jose Fermoso

$7,000

USB Stake Helps Brown Thumbs Turn Green, Monitors Soil Conditions

Those cacti on your windowsill don't deserve to die. Even if you regularly fail at horticulture, the EasyBloom can help. Just leave it in your proposed planting area for 24 hours, either stuck in the dirt or propped up in its cradle, then plug it into your computer's USB port. The gizmo measures soil conditions, sunlight, temperature, and humidity, comparing the results with an online database to recommend species that will thrive there. And should the weather be wacky that day, the EasyBloom is smart enough to check the National Weather Service for local averages. Your data is stored online for quick reference. If you've already killed everything in the garden, plunk the sensor down in your little Death Valley, set it to Monitor mode, and let it tell you what you're doing wrong. But here's a tip: If you find yourself running the autopsy repeatedly, it could be something basic. You do have to water the crops, you know. The EasyBloom can't do everything for you. —Elizabeth Livengood

$60

Svelte Ultralight Notebook Comes Fully Loaded

Ultralight notebooks come dressed to impress, but most disappoint when it's time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. Not the Voodoo Envy 133, a glossy black Kubrickian slab of awesomeness that makes other ultralights weep from their USB ports. Encased in carbon fiber, the Envy is just 0.7-inch thick and weighs 3.4 pounds when outfitted with a solid-state hard drive. Its looks will induce pangs of jealousy in the boardroom; back in the hotel room, the Envy proves that it's not just a pretty face. Even the base model rocks the tiny-team roster with a 1.6-GHz Intel processor, 2 gigs of RAM, swappable battery, LED-backlit display, and the widest array of ports — HDMI, eSATA, and ExpressCard — in its class. Like most of the svelte set, the Envy is heavy on wireless (802.11n, Bluetooth), but wired users aren't locked out. Since the case is thinner than an Ethernet jack, Voodoo built the connector into the power brick, which generates a dedicated wireless link with the computer. An instant-on OS lets you surf the Web or make Skype calls without booting up Windows. It all adds up to one drool-worthy package. —Christopher Null

$2,100, and up

Cycling GPS Tells You Where You Are — and How You Got There

At Wired, we love cycling almost as much as we love melting the chrome off passing cars with our high-powered laser. Almost. But even the combustion crew couldn't help raising an eyebrow at Garmin's top-tier, GPS-enabled cycling computer. This Tour-worthy unit tells you not only where you are but — thanks to heart rate, distance, and elevation tracking — exactly how you got there. The 2.2-inch color screen is as easy to read in the noontime glare as a sundial and offers more data-customization options than a crooked accountant. The Edge plays nice with wireless power meters to let you monitor the wattage you're generating while you pedal. It even lets you beam saved routes to other nearby 705 users. Optional street maps ensure that you can always find your way around town. So program this into your new Edge: 520 Third Street, San Francisco. Just don't roll up on some chromed-out fixie, because not even the 705 can see Lazor coming. —Mathew Honan

$500

It's the All-Digital Future â€“ $100 Netflix Box Streams 15,000 Films

At the start of 2008, the Web-streamed movie experience still felt like a half-baked preview of its potential. Digital delivery required expensive hardware, and you paid extra for each rental (cough, Apple TV ... cough, Vudu). It wasn't the future we'd hoped for. Then came Roku's Netflix Player, the $100 video box that could summon more than 15,000 titles at no charge for Netflix subscribers. It was a revelation, wherein we learned what streaming video was supposed to feel like: nothing. That nothing changed everything. So go ahead, tear through all four seasons of The Office on a whim (then the original British version for good measure). Watch Strays because there's nobody home to exercise a Vin Diesel veto. For movies you can't stream, you still get your little red envelopes. And the same Roku box you love now will support hi-def streams when Netflix offers them. This little treasure chest is the real thing, straight from the all-digital future. —John Mahoney

$100

Try This at Home: Camera on a Flex Cable Finds Lost Objects

Milwaukee may have designed it to help home inspectors spot hidden mold or shoddy repairs, but the M-Spector is just too much fun to leave to the pros. Did your 5-year-old really drop your diamond ring down the sink — or pawn it for Fruit Roll-Ups? Want to find out the easy way how many bananas your "hilarious" brother-in-law stuffed in your tailpipe? Grab the M-Spector, thumb the power button, and the 2.5-inch screen lights up with 320x240-pixel color video, transmitted from the tiny CMOS camera on the end of its flexible neck. A camera-mounted LED illuminates dark and dismal places, letting you see anywhere you can cram the 3-foot-long cable. Sure, cops could use the M-Spector to peer around corners or ferret out shanks in prison cells, but it's equally effective at locating the perfectly good grape that rolled under your fridge. Just don't get too creative; you'll probably want to draw the line at home colonoscopies. —Chuck Cage

$250

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I've had a few months for the Comcast debacle to settle in, and have a few thoughts this morning to share. First a review of what happened. 1. When I moved into the new house in Berkeley, I got Comcast for TV and AT&T DSL for Internet. I had had terrible experience with Comcast at the apartment I rented while house shopping, lots of outages, and lots of time spent on the phone with Comcast trying to convince them the problem was theirs and not mine, each time resulting in them fixing the problem on their end. I wanted to see if DSL would be any more reliable. I've found that it is quite reliable. (However in the end so was Comcast, at least at a technical level. The problems at the apartment were probably due to the newness of the building, high turnover, and construction projects nearby.) 2. At some point I saw a story on TechMeme saying that AT&T was playing funny games with their customers, so I decided to order Comcast Internet service as a backup, in case something went weird with my AT&T DSL service. The Comcast service was unused for many months, there was no need for me to use it, AT&T service was fine. If ain't broke don't fix it, an old belief of mine.

3. Then the fateful moment -- I saw a tweet from Dave Sifry saying he had just done a perf test on his Comcast service and found it was delivering incredible throughput. I immediately did the test on my own, and was amazed that it was delivering a consistent 14 megabits up, 5 megabits down, sometimes with as high as 28 megabits up. That did it, a few days later I switched the roles of the two networks, using AT&T as the backup and Comcast as the primary. 4. At roughly the same time I was starting active testing of the photo aggregator part of FlickrFan. I had five computers running the software, all downloading hundreds of high-rez pics every day from AP and AFP. I only needed one, but as I said I was burning in the software, and sheez, I had all that bandwidth, the net never got slow, and it was a source of pride at first that I could do it and then I forgot they were all running. Until one day... 5. My Internet service was cut. I thought it was an outage, but when I called, I was told they had cut me off deliberately. I was current with my bill (if I recall correctly a total of about $180 per month for both services), but they said I was using too much bandwidth, though they wouldn't say how much I had used. I found it more than appalling that they cut me off just to get me to call them when they could have sent an email, or communicated through comcastcares on Twitter. There are so many better ways to communicate with customers. But I think they must have hired a psychiatrist who told them if you want customers to be compliant, treat them like overdue college-age billpayers, even when they're customers in good standing. You're more likely to get what you want. I wrote up the experience on my weblog, as I am doing now. They told me that if I didn't reduce my Internet usage to what they considered a normal level, without specifying what that was or offering me any way to measure my usage, they would cut me off again, ony next time the outage would be for 12 months. I know this must sound unreal, that I must be exaggerating, I wouldn't believe it myself if I were reading it on someone else's blog, but that's what they said. 6. Having been threatened, I did two things. I reduced the use of the Internet on my LAN and I ordered DirecTV so, in case this happened again, I would just revert to AT&T and would have the redundant TV service. I also bought EyeTV devices for three of my computers so I could receive digital over-the-air broadcasts. It amazes people when they find out that such high quality transmissions are available for free over the public air waves. 7. Of course, eventually they cut me off again. I think it was after I downloaded all the content off my server onto a local hard disk for backup (it was shortly after doing that that they cut me off, I'm saying it wasn't likely a coincidence). Rather than call them, I instructed comcastcares to cancel my service, giving me the slightest shred of pride and honor, having been treated so shabbily by a vendor, in the end it was I who cut them off, not vice versa. (Yeah sure, if you believe that...) 8. Now it occurred to me that with a new administration coming into office, it might be time to re-open the issue of how vendors like Comcast resell access to something that doesn't belong to them, the Internet. It seems there be some rules about what they can and can't do, since they don't behave reasonably on their own. If all they were selling was access to other Comcast customers, I might be able to understand them being so awful with their customers, but this is a case where they have something like a monopoly providing access to a public space, and a clear conflict of interest, a reason to want to cripple that public space. Seems like a time when the government should take an interest in regulating what they can and can't do. Imho. 9. No I never forget shit like this. Sorry.

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