It takes about 15 seconds to connect to any of the radio's 13,000 stations, nearly twice the number available to other Internet radios. They're organized in 68 categories from Adult to World Tropical, and you can even listen to the BBC in Arabic or Mandarin.

The audio is surprisingly rich and clear, considering the radio's single speaker. Its built-in alarm clock can be a career-saver for those who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, but like its peers, the ITC-IR1000B doesn't have an FM radio. On top of Internet radio stations, RSS audio feeds and podcasts, the radio can lift music stored on your PC as well as the Pandora music service , enlarging the radio's repertoire manyfold and making it truly capable of tuning in the world.

Wi-Fi SD card and camera: Beam up your snapshots

Eye-Fi Share card Nobody likes wasting time fumbling with flash cards or cables to get photos out of a camera and onto a PC or online photo-sharing service. It's hard to believe, but a Wi-Fi network can help you put your pictures exactly where you want them.

The $100 Eye-Fi Share card squeezes a Wi-Fi radio and 2GB of flash memory into a tiny Secure Digital (SD) card. Basically, it works with any camera that has an SD card slot and supports 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi equipment. After loading the software on my computer and entering my network's security code with my PC's keyboard, the card quickly connected with my Wi-Fi network; in all, it took 2 minutes.

Now, whenever I bring my Nikon D50 within 75 feet of my router, the photos are automatically transferred to either my PC or an online picture service—or both. Eye-Fi's Manager software can forward the photos to any of two dozen online photo services, from Blue String to Web Shots. It takes about 7.5 seconds to move a 1.5MB photo. If I'm out of range, the Share card holds up to a thousand top-quality photos until it's close enough to transfer them.

If you're not interested in uploading photos to an online service, consider the Eye-Fi Home card, which costs $80 and sends the images to a computer only.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ50S camera If you're in the market for a new camera, Panasonic's $400 Lumix DMC-TZ50S has it all. It's a capable camera that bypasses the PC and beams its photos over an 802.11b or g network, but rather than the choice of several online photo sites, it works only with Google's Picasa service. (See our review of the Lumix DMC-TZ50.)