If you want to hear words rather than music, try the Lingo Voyager II Talking Translator from Magellan's ($199, www.magellans.com). This doodad can display on an eight-line, backlit screen more than 240,000 words and 27,000 phrases in 12 languages and also "speak" them. The display shows how to pronounce the foreign words in your native language and then pronounces them with the touch of a button.

Like a well-stocked PDA, the Voyager II also includes a metric converter, a currency converter, a 12-digit talking calculator, six travel games, world time clock (times available for more than 200 cities) with alarm, a voice/memo recorder and a 32K memory phone book. Private listening can take place using the included earphones.

And all that is powered by a pair of included AAA batteries.

Students and writers looking for a simple-to-use word processor might want to check out the AlphaSmart Neo from Renaissance Learning ($249, www.alphasmart.com). No distractions from the Internet, games or instant messaging with this baby. Instead, with a full-sized keyboard, a display that can be set up for two to six lines of text per screen in its AlphaWord Plus word processor and 512 KB to store hundreds of pages of single-spaced text, the Neo keeps the focus on writing. The word processor program includes spell-check, a thesaurus, a dictionary for adding words and terms, find/replace and word-count features and more.

The Neo weighs only two pounds and has a 700-hour battery life on three AAs. It has USB ports and is compatible with Apple and PC desktop and notebook computers.

Don't feel like writing? Feel like vegging instead? Try the Veg-N ($99.95, www.rtv-veg.com). This system allows a desktop or notebook computer to be used as an "enhanced resolution" digital TV screen for TV shows, movies and games. It also can function as a digital video recorder to tape programs onto a desktop or notebook hard drive.

If you want to keep the fun to yourself, a Picture-In-Window allows you to watch movies or TV while doing your other computer work. If you want to share, you can use it to connect your PlayStation, Xbox and GameCube consoles to two computers for multi-screen videogame action, or have TV and movies show up on two computers.

If security is your thing, Sequiam Corp. (www.sequiam.com) offers a couple of options: the BioVault 2.0 ($349) and the BioLock ($249).