HP is hoping there’re a lot of people out there with mass printing needs but without regular Internet access. Their new PhotoSmart Premium printer has a Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen on the front that allows a user to print directly from the Internet. The idea is that the printer would be a quick way of printing out online directions, pictures, movie tickets, and so forth, without the need of a computer.

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have.

Following through promises made back in January, Best of What's New winner Eye-Fi today released new Wi-Fi-equipped SD memory cards that that upload videos, as well as photos, to the Web.

Someday soon there'll be a chicken in every pot and a centralized media center in every home. Till then, we're stuck with what we've got; some companies are rising to the challenge. Golden Signals, which debuted DisplayShare this week, is one of the more innovative: its wireless TV-computer linkup utilizes your existing gaming console and router.

Install the $50 software and your computer begins creating a realtime video of every action occurring on the desktop. By simultaneously commanding the console (currently only Playstation 3, but a version that works with the Wii and Xbox 360 is expected by summer) to stream the video on TV, DisplayShare allows you to view anything you'd see on your computer on the big screen.

The chief marketing officer of Ericsson announced at a conference in Europe yesterday that he thinks Wi-Fi is endangered, and will be soon be replaced by mobile broadband networks. Connectivity wont be hotspot-based, but available everywhere. He went so far as to compare cafe-style Wi-Fi to the telephone boxes of yesteryear.

Forget AT&T and the like. The only phone company you need is Skype, which routes your calls over the Internet and, as of May 15, 2006, costs nothing for outgoing calls made by users in the U.S. and Canada. And now you can almost forget your cellphone provider too-with this new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gear, you can make calls using Skype (or Vonage, another VoIP provider) from just about anywhere.

The promise of Wi-Fi is freedom-the ability to bring your laptop or PDA away from the anchor that is your desk and into your life. With most wireless routers, however, your life had better stop at around 300 feet, and forget about heading outside. Between the noise generated by other local wireless devices and physical obstacles like furniture and walls, chances are your Wi-Fi signal is little more than a whisper by the time it hits your backyard. So I built a box that can pick up that signal and boost it another 200 to 300 feet.

My mom loves seeing my digital photos, whether they´re of far-off places or my latest culinary creations, so I´ve long thought about building her a digital-photo frame that would show a new shot every time she walked by. But instead of loading 1,000 images onto a hard drive, I wanted to be able to update the library remotely, adding new pics as I shot them, so she could always see what I´d whipped up that night or where I´d traveled that weekend. I also wanted the whole project to be cheap, because, well, I´m cheap.