Just because I'm a fat American doesn't mean I've always wanted a fat American computer. Over the years I have grown to hate so-called performance laptops from Dell and HP. They were big, ugly and heavy enough to rip your shoulder out of your socket, and getting bigger, uglier and heavier all the time. Why didn't we get those little laptops, you know, the ones made for Japan and available only on Dynamism? Like the lady who buys shoes a few sizes too small, I sought a computer that could be used for emails and surfing and not require steroid supplements to transport. Oh, and could it be cheap, too? I spend all my money on fast food.

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Naoki Maru may live in Hikone, north of Kyoto, down the road from a samurai castle full of katana swords and armour, but for him, the ancient Japanese art of bushido is best carried out with robots, not people. King Kizer, the Maru family robot, has dominated the Robo-One tourney over the past three years, collecting US$50,000 in prize money. Maru, a factory engineer by day, is trying to perfect a way to make Kizer even more of an arse kicker using a technique he had seen many times in anime: A harness that captures human movements and translates them into robotic attacks and other gestures.

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When I met with Nicholas Negroponte not long ago, he laughed at the coverage he'd received through the past few years, including our own portrayal of Intel chairman Craig Barrett and him as Beavis and Butthead. Far more hurtful have been the admonitions of his own former staffers who feel he has mismanaged the OLPC project. Nearly every one of the original staff had abandoned the project by 2008, often in disgust. But Negroponte remains stalwart: "My elephant skin is the thickness of steel," he told me. Perhaps his resistance to criticism has been one of the project's fatal flaws.

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If you were feverishly anticipating a mobile phone this year, it was one of two phones: the iPhone 3G or this phone. The BlackBerry Bold is RIM's most powerful, polished handset ever. With 3G, a glossy new UI, a real web browser, serious hardware and an almost beautiful body, the Bold doesn't redefine the BlackBerry experience, but it does elevate to the highest point its ever been.

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The biggest chokepoint in technology is a single roadblock: batteries. Amidst all of the amazing advances in the last 50 years, battery tech has remained fundamentally unchanged, engineers incrementally squeezing out a few extra drops of power from old tech each year. With better batteries, you wouldn't just be able to make it through the day with your iPhone 3G on a single charge, but laptops and phones could run faster, electric cars would rule the highways--it'd be like a brand new world. There are like a million different kinds, but here's a rundown of the most common ones we're stuck with in gadgets for now, and their strengths and weaknesses.

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In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen travelled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a "working" US$100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection display; it was smaller, made of green plastic, and had a crank for the kids to work—for 10 straight minutes per hour of use—when they had no other access to electricity. It was a vast improvement over that January's pup-tent rear-projection laptop, hampered only by the fact that it was an absolute fake.

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From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his US$100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world's supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea.

The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the US$100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let's not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte's crazy idea hasn't only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world's largest notebook maker, it's also become a product most of Negroponte's opponents are now copying.

After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO.

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AT&T was calling me to set up an interview with their CTO, but all I could hear was garbled noise on my AT&T iPhone. "I can't really hear you!" I shouted, as if volume would clear the channel. It's always been like this, in my home in San Francisco.

While the howls of iPhone 3G reception issues get louder and louder, I've always wondered if it was the network's fault, as some Swedish scientists and journalists have recently suggested. Maybe it's just new AT&T customers making the bulk of the noise. From my experience, the phone isn't blameless, but the network is a major part of the issue.

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It has been quite an Olympics hasn't it? From the spectacular opening ceremonies, to the amazing performances by Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt (not to mention all of the controversy stirred up by the Chinese government). In years past I can't say that I was all that excited about the Olympics--but I will be kind of sad to see this one go. The good news is that just because the games are over doesn't mean you can't carry the torch...literally. So, check out the following ten gadgets to learn how to play like an Olympian.

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I've always been a Windows user, which means I've always been subjected to the ridicule of holier-than-thou Apple fans. You know what I'm talking about: blue screen of death jokes, spelling Microsoft with a $us in place of the S, saying "it just works" with a smug, chubby-faced smirk. It's always been annoying, and it's always made me want to avoid using Apple products just so I wouldn't turn into one of those people. But then the iPhone came out, and I wanted it. But I being a Windows dude, I knew to wait a year for what I thought would be a more complete, less buggy version. It was Apple's opportunity to get me into the fold, to make me a member of the cult. And boy, did they blow it.

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