Your Guide to the Latest Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos for the Net

Want a sneak peek at where the Internet is headed? Take a look at what happened to the telephone, and you'll get a preview of the wild ride that the Internet is about to begin.

For decades, "using the telephone" meant talking into a basic black handset in your home or office to one other person in their home or office on a similar basic black handset. And then--KABOOM! An explosion of new technologies and entrepreneurial fervor brought a flurry of new alternatives that redefined what "using the telephone" meant. The telephone handset itself blossomed from an ugly duckling into a swan--or a duck decoy, if you preferred. Or a sneaker phone. Or a Mickey Mouse phone. Phones went cordless and cellular, so you could talk from practically anywhere on the planet--or from 30,000 feet above the planet on an airphone.

On the socio-cultural front, with a phone in every room of the house came a generation of movies about those darn teenagers (usually Hayley Mills) plotting amongst themselves to keep the world safe for democracy and dream boats. In the realm of commerce, the telephone carved out its unique new role with 800 numbers, 976 numbers, and countless boiler-room scams designed to separate unsuspecting retirees from their nest eggs.

Today, there are zillions of different ways to expand and enhance how you use the phone. Conference calls. Call-forwarding. Call-waiting. Caller ID. Answering machines. The "black boxes" that gave Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and countless other hackers their start. The fax machine, credited with everything from the rise of a new form of junk mail on slimy paper to the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War to sending copies of the kids' drawings to the grandparents. Those little pink While-You-Were-Out message pads. Press 3 for more options.

Brace Yourself The Net is just now starting a KABOOM! of its own. Although the Net has skyrocketed in popularity, practically everybody online today is still using the Internet's equivalent of the basic black handset approach: You boot up a browser on your desktop computer, which is connected to a corporate LAN or a dial-up network. The Net today is poised like a roller coaster that's just finished its initial climb and is about to careen off in a non-stop series of breathtaking new directions. With the latest tools and technologies, you'll be able to access the Net in a mind-boggling array of new ways. To help us determine which ones will swim and which ones will sink faster than a sneaker phone with a couple of pet rocks for ballast, we invited a cross-section of Internet surfers into The Net's test center to give us their hands-on reactions.

How will these products change your Net life? For starters, thanks to a slew of new devices with built-in Net access, you don't need a PC to connect to the Net anymore. With low-cost devices such as WebTV, Bandai's Sega Saturn Net Link, and Macintosh-inspired Pippin set-top boxes already here--and with high-speed cable modems from your local cable TV provider--you can use your television as your portal to the Net. There's even a new generation of TVs coming (for example Mitsubishi's DiamondWeb) that will be specifically designed for the side-by-side display of a traditional TV program and its Web page.

The Net is also being built into a new generation of smart phones and paging equipment. Some of these devices have screens large enough for reading e-mail and browsing Web sites; others have small displays only big enough to check preset chunks of data, such as stock quotes and weather forecasts.

The Everywhere Net Where you get the Net is changing along with how you get it. The Net can now be comfortably ensconced in the living room as part of the home entertainment center: PCs such as the Gateway Destination transform the Net from a solitary endeavor in the home office or den where one person is hunched over a computer monitor, to a group activity where the whole family relaxes on the couch with a bowl of popcorn or a six-pack. If the kitchen is your hub for home communications, and you're ready to upgrade from refrigerator magnets to Net-based messaging, you can add Net access there with a sleek device such as the Monorail.

With hand-held gadgets like Apple's MessagePad 2000, Net access joins the ranks of truly portable devices, including cellular phones and pagers, that you can keep on your person at all times. If your person doesn't like that arrangement, you can log onto the Net from public access kiosks at cybercafes and airports.

Where's the Catch? Of course, techno-progress always has its price. With set-top boxes, you'll have limited (or no) local storage. Most of these systems are closed environments that allow for little or no software updating. Some of these newfangled devices tie you to particular service providers. Viewed on a small LCD screen or on your current TV set, the Net is a less legible place than it is on your computer monitor.

Perhaps most significantly, as the Net becomes more ubiquitous it will also become more fragmented. When you access the Net from a PC today, you have access to a constellation of related but separate capabilities, including Web browsing, file access, and e-mail. When you access the Net from more specialized devices, you may be limited to a single function, such as sending and receiving e-mail, accessing specific data (such as stock quotes), surfing private intranet sites, online shopping, group scheduling, videoconferencing, playing games, or running proprietary Java applications.

Overall, our testers were anxious to dive into the future--with some reservations. In addition to sharing their verdicts on seven of the hottest new prospects, we've also collected the vital statistics on the rest of the first wave of products designed to revolutionize your Internet experience.