Stories by: Edward N. Albro

Planning on hitting the jackpot soon? From a gargantuan HDTV to your own flying car, here are nine new tech toys you'll want to decorate your life.

If you already have a multi-room digital music-streaming system, you don't have to replace it, but the Zone Player 120 is a nice choice for new buyers.

This week saw the battle of the Web 2.0 conferences, with 70 entrepreneurs presenting their ideas at Demo Fall 2008 in San Diego and 50 more making their pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Some of the ideas are little more than a glimmer in a coder's eye, but others are already doing business, are in private beta, or are soon to launch. Here's a selection of our favourites.

Is the iPhone 3G worth waiting in line for? Early reviewers of Apple's new smart phone are mostly positive, but they share some common gripes about battery life and two aspects of dealing with AT&T: the service-plan costs and the skimpy 3G coverage areas.

A couple of months ago, I downloaded a beta version of Firefox 3 just to look at the new ideas Mozilla was working on. My intention was to try it for a couple days, then switch back to Firefox 2. I wasn't worried about stability (it's a browser after all -- what's the worst that can happen?). But the beta wasn't compatible with lots of my favourite extensions and who wants to live without them?

The Sonos Digital Music System, introduced in 2004, is a well-designed, generally reliable way to stream music from devices

After a rocky start, the latest flavor of wi-fi, 802.11n, should come into its own this year, with prices for new equipment coming down significantly and lots of options for sale to add 802.11n technology without getting rid of your older gear. And networks will start to move from the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum to the 5 GHz spectrum, where there's less danger of interference.

With a sleek new antenna-less design and one router selling for less than US$100, Linksys hopes to breathe new life into what they admit have been disappointing sales of 802.11n products.

The past few years have seen a clear trend toward ridding desktop PCs of wires. But the VGA cable connecting your system to your monitor has been a stubborn holdout. Now a company called Quartics is looking to sever that tie, using technology that will allow monitors to link via wired or wireless USB connections.

Google brings all the searching power of its Web based search engine to your office network with the Google Mini.