The Vye S37, on the surface, seems like one of the more ideal UMPCs available. It's size is fairly comparable to other UMPCs, it has a 7-inch touchscreen, a tablet mode, and all of the other bells and whistles you expect and need on an Ultra-Mobile Personal Computer. The one thing it's got that no other UMPCs have, however, is one of the first things that was sacrificed when the first UMPCs were developed--an optical drive.

The omission makes sense, really. If you're all about portability and compactness (but don't want the tiny screen of a smart phone) you probably aren't carrying around a stack of data DVDs, so who needs an optical drive to access them? However, if your UMPC does everything else you need it to do, it does seem a little weird to have it be unable to play that discount DVD you found in a bargain bin during some down time on a business trip. The thing is, there's another reason to not have an optical drive.

Countless sci-fi movies have incorporated different iterations of these technologically advantageous tools and I’ve always swooned over them (okay, not swooned but…drooled). So what’s the premise? You have a lot of reading to do and a lot of research to conduct and the whole task just seems daunting. Welcome the Dixau Text Scanner. This little gizmo, when passed over the pages of a book or magazine (or whatever text you can find really. Perhaps even a Shreddies box…), is capable of recognizing and parsing text, making it ideal for transferring notes onto your laptop or desktop.

How many times do you find yourself in need of a quick conversion, whether it be currency exchanging, meters to feet, Celsius to Fahrenheit, lbs to kilograms? Or maybe you just want to know how many drams are in a pinch? Er what? The Converter application for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers so many different units to converter to and from that I spent half my time testing it exploring new units of measurement that I’ve never even heard of.

All things considered, a program that offers such a myriad of measurements may suggest a cumbersome interface, after all there are 17 categories alone from which you can select a multitude of different units. Those categories are: Area, Clothing, Currency, Data Storage, Energy, Flow, Fuel Consumption, Kitchen, Length, Power, Pressure, Speed, Temperature, Time, Torque, Volume, and Mass. However, this program offers a simple, streamlined approach. From the main screen you select a category from a list (which also offers easy to identify icons), then a unit to convert from and a unit to convert to. At the base of the main screen is your standard calculator interface from which you enter the amount you want converted. There is even a sliding scale for precision, which adjusts how many decimal places you want the conversion to be accurate to.