The biggest surprise watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most peoples TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen thats across the room.

The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that's not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.

Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?

An international team of psychiatrists has flown to Redmond, WA in an attempt to discover exactly what makes Bill Gates tick. And, more especially, what makes him go cuckoo every half hour.

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

If Apple ever lowers the iPod's price and develops Windows software for it, watch out: the invasion of the iPod people will surely begin in earnest.

One day robots may even babysit our kids, a job that has always required a human touch.