DAVID POGUE

My interest was magic, believe it or not. I became an amateur magician and did something like 400 magic shows through my teen years.

I travel a ridiculous amount, so I've thought a lot about, and spent a lot of time refining, what I carry and how I carry it.

My little self-analysis is that consumer technology is the closest thing we have to magic. You push a button and something happens at your command. The things that get me fired up the most have always been the things that seem the most magical.

A running theme in my life is my inability to say no to anything.

For an industry that's built on science, the technology world sure has its share of myths.

What is innovation if not our ticket to every business interest in the world? It's the ticket to solving the world's problems - the energy problems, the pollution problems, the global warming problems. If it isn't for science and engineering, how will we compete in the new world?

The key to understanding my career is that I was never into technology. From the beginning, I brought an outsider's point of view, which is why I write for a layman's publication.

I'm the know-nothing. I'm curious, I try to be entertaining, I try to translate the techno jargon, but in the end I'm the audience's representative.

I'm always surprised at how many people seem to like reading about what hardware and software I use.

Walking is a skill that took millions of years for us to develop... If you wanted to design a robot that could walk as well as a person, this would be fantastically complicated software. It would have to be doing billions of calculations with every step.

One day robots may even babysit our kids, a job that has always required a human touch.

The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades - ka-ching!

If you continue to improve a product enough, you'll eventually ruin it.

Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

The biggest surprise watching video on the tiny, 2.5-inch screen (320 by 240 pixels) is completely immersive. Three unexpected factors are at work. First, the picture itself is sharp and vivid, with crisp action that never smears the screen is noticeably brighter than on previous iPods. Second, because the audio is piped directly into your ear sockets, it has much higher fidelity and presence than most peoples TV sets. Finally, remember that a 2.5-inch screen a foot from your face fills as much of your vision as a much larger screen thats across the room.

The rise of the citizen review site is a sobering development. No longer are you on top of the mountain, blasting your marketing message down to the masses through your megaphone. All of a sudden, the masses are conversing with one another. If your service or product isn't any good, they'll out you.

People won't start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit.

The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that's not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects.

Everyones always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, Probably never.

Just as words in their proper places form sentences, each individual strike must be done in the proper order to get the desired result: a flat stone blade.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

If Apple ever lowers the iPod's price and develops Windows software for it, watch out: the invasion of the iPod people will surely begin in earnest.

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”