It’s no news that everyone from retailers to movie studios and electronics manufacturers wants you to buy a Blu-ray DVD player. They hit early adopters with “be the first on your block” ad campaigns, and now that the format war is over they’re still offering the kind of incentives usually seen when a technology is new: Just recently, Amazon started offering buyers of select Blu-ray players an $80 add-on bundle that would get their movie collection jump-started. (The titles included are a mixed bag, pictured, but $10 per film is quite a price.) Some of the incentives are a bit more thoughtful than usual. Martin Scorsese lovers who already own the standard DVD version of Gangs of New York, for instance, can ease the pain of buying a second version for Blu-ray by mailing in a coupon for a $10 rebate (other titles are eligible as well). A better development — financially and practically — is the new trend of “digital copy” bundling. Some movie studios are bundling second discs with certain Blu-ray titles that contain a digital file users can install on iPods for mobile viewing. Fox’s Juno was a prominent early example, but other companies — like Warner Brothers, with 10,000 B.C. and Lionsgate with the latest Rambo flick — are getting into the game. Hopefully, it will soon become an industry standard to let buyers own portable digital versions of the DVD movies they buy.

We hear a lot about the decline of reading, often blamed on competing entertainment such as computer games. But for those who devour bestselling crime novels and science fiction/fantasy books, reading and computer games go hand in hand. Wildly popular author, James Patterson (“America’s #1 storyteller,” according to press releases), has expanded his brand to include an interactive game called “Death in Scarlet,” based on his Women’s Murder Club series of novels. The game, which is downloadable on PCs and available all over the web for a free trial, will be released for Windows Vista/XP on Aug. 26 for $29 (preorder at Amazon). It offers gamers a brand new Patterson story about a chilling series of murders in San Francisco. The investigation allows players to find hidden objects inside nine investigations full of brain-bending puzzles and “strikingly beautiful artwork” on their way to solving the psychotic killer’s identity. First of a planned series based on Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club novels, “Death in Scarlet” is aimed at female ”casual gamers” who like simple rules and ease of play. Fans of bestselling writer, Orson Scott Card, will soon have their own video game to enjoy. “Ender’s Game: Battle Room” (based on his novel) is coming to most downloadable platforms, though the release date is unannounced. Card will be a chief consultant on adapting the novel into a game.

Friday’s release of the “3G” version of Apple’s iPhone ($200) was a sensation, drawing a wave of eager customers that, despite lessons learned last year, actually dragged the activation procees to a halt for some folks. Still, the speedier, more fully featured phone arrived not a moment too soon, as other cell-phone manufacturers are desperate to ride Apple’s design coattails. This is nothing new, of course: Months before the first generation was released, there was already enough imitation going on for Apple to take legal action. Some trend followers beat the original iPhone onto the market while others appeared to vanish before they got beyond the design phase; still others were clumsy enough to get tech journalists snickering, and have stayed in China to date. Today, the big hit in the non-iPhone iPhone arena appears to be Samsung’s Instinct (which starts at around $500, but with “instant savings” and rebates, the price drops to $130) comfortable , a familiar-looking little candybar that leapfrogs the new iPhone’s GPS capabilities by boasting actual turn-by-turn directions. (The iPhone will simply find your location on a map; the rest is up to you.) Then there’s LG’s Voyager, around $200, which combines touchscreen input with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Nokia’s N800 ($300 online, but they’re out of stock on their website and at Amazon.com) takes a different design road, grafting its wide-format screen onto a case resembling a vintage electric shaver. None of these are cheap, and prices vary widely because of discounts and rebates, but the new HTC Touch Diamond (which the FCC just approved but is not yet on the U.S. market) and Samsung’s i900 (pictured), which also hasn’t hit the market yet, thoroughly compared here, buck trends by having a base cost, expected to be around $600, which is far higher than the iPhone’s slashed price. At least with those two, you wouldn’t be committed to using AT&T, as you are with Apple’s product. And what of that smartphone titan, the Blackberry? While their upcoming “Thunder 9500,” which will be tied to Verizon and is expected to hit store shelves in September, may eventually rock users’ worlds, gossip on the Internet (some of which is chronicled here) suggests it’s far from ready for prime time. However, if you want a sneak peek at it, tech blogger Boy Genius claims to have found the first picture of one and boasts about it on his blog.

Club Penguin, Toontown and Webkinz are online virtual worlds created for children, where kids can safely pretend they are a host of different cartoon or animal-like characters. They can play games, adopt pets and make friends. At Disney’s Club Penguin, a child can create a penguin, name it, dance, wave and send greeting cards or “talk” with other penguins. Before your child starts to play, be sure to read the Parent’s Guide. Club Penguin is for kids 6 to 14. They can play for free, but membership ($5.95 a month, $57.95 a year) lets them dress up their penguin and adopt more than one Puffle (a fuzzy round pet).  Toontown Online (screenshot pictured), also from Disney, is another online multiplayer role-playing game, designed for kids 7 and older. (What is Toontown is helpful for parents.) Children create a character (usually an animal), and explore Toontown. As they run, walk, swim and climb in this brightly colored animated world, they can compete in games and battle evil robot Cogs (which aren’t really scary). Kids can play for free, but a bigger world for members is $80 annually or $10 a month. At Webkinz, by Ganz, you begin by buying a Webkinz toy. The plush pets each come with their own code. By entering the code, players get access to the games and activities at Webkinz. Bbtoystore is one of the sites where you can buy the toys online. For example, a set of four stuffed toys (the Siamese cat, Lemon Lime gecko, Pink Googles the duck and Striped Snake) is $60.  A bullfrog is $12, and a single spotted leopard is $16. At the Webkinz e-store, you can buy accessories for your stuffed animal, like a super bed ($9). Log into Webkinz, enter the code and the pet “comes to life.” Then kids can feed, dress and play with it.

Why are people still buying book lights with conventional incandescent bulbs? The answer isn’t price: The famous Itty Bitty light costs $45 (some of which probably goes to that cutesy package), and users have to budget $7 a pop for replacement bulbs. Meanwhile, LED bulbs practically last forever and are more eco-friendly to boot, using much less energy to deliver comparable light. This Xtra Flex 2 from Mighty Bright has a more easily maneuverable neck than the Itty Bitty lamp, clips firmly onto your book (or stands by itself), and at $17 is just over a third of its competitor’s price. Granted, those of us who don’t want to run on battery power have to spend another $10 on an AC adapter — it’s still a bargain, and the cord is long enough to reach the most inconvenient under-the-bed power outlet. The Mighty Bright folks have branched out cleverly, with a two-arm light/magnifier gizmo for crafters and some sleek workhorses for musicians, but the item that will likely come in handy for us all at some point, whether we read at bedtime or not, is a magnifying glass with a built-in lamp — you may still have a hard time comprehending the fine print of that new cell-phone contract, but at least you’ll be able to read it.

The techheads at Wired recently declared we’re in the “Petabyte Age,” in which massive quantities of computer storage can fundamentally change scientific research. Astoundingly, for just a couple hundred dollars, you yourself can own a terabyte of storage — just one notch below (a thousandth, in other words) the earth-shattering petabyte. (Just in case you aren’t good with the numbers, the terabyte holds 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes.) For a mere $220, for instance, Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Plus can be yours, resplendent in brushed metal case and boasting a quiet operation that belies the muscular operations within. Just for your edification regarding the heft of a terabyte, entries on Wikipedia say that all of Walmart’s data is stored on 500 terabytes of data, and YouTube holds more than 600 terabytes of video. The Maxtor is compatible with both Mac and PC, the OneTouch naturally comes with backup software that stores duplicate copies of everything on your computer without your having to worry about it; it also can encrypt all that data for you, lest prying eyes want to snoop through personal records. Less common is its ability to sync data between multiple computers, eliminating the frustration that sometimes arrives when you’re in the middle of a project and realize you left an important phone number on your laptop at home. But backups and data-syncs are like laundry and dishwashing: Happily, having a terabyte at your disposal means all the chores can be done by one little corner of the hard drive while vast swaths of disk space are available for the good stuff: 1 TB, after all, is enough room to store a thousand hours of digital video (depending how it’s compressed) or nearly two years of continuous music. By the time you’re tired of all those songs, you’ll probably be able to afford a petabyte, which would hold enough music for the next two millennia.

There’s a long history in the audio-visual industry of fetishizing the little bits of gear that make the high-priced electronic components work together. If you’re going to spend a few grand on a stereo receiver, after all, you might look like an easy mark for salesmen hawking $100 Monster HDMI cable and 24 carat gold wire connectors — you might even be talked into spending $465 on a string of speaker wire with a “slender profile and jewel-like finish.” Who cares if the benefits of these hyped products are often dubious, with plenty of tech-heads providing hands-on analysis in exposés like this one. Consumer annoyance with this trend seems to have come to a boil recently, as influential blogs like Boing Boing Gadgets note that the luxury cable trend is migrating from A/V gear to mundane objects found in any computer user’s drawer. In response to Denon’s introduction of a 1.5 meter Ethernet cable costing $500 (pictured), Amazon users have taken to the barricades, using the site’s customer feedback system to post what BB describes as “perhaps the best Amazon reviews page of all time.” Scrolling through the list, Rob Beschizza found triumphs of facetiousness like a one-star review by a man who claims to “regularly spend over $1,000 on cables to get the ultimate sound” and warns readers that, if readers ignore Denon’s directions and accidentally plug the cable in the wrong direction, “your music will play backwards.” Others feign geeky ecstasy, praising the cable while wishing they could plug it into their own bodies or boasting that it moved data along with such speed the electrons left black holes in their wake. The cables also solve global warming, we’re told, and deserve “eleventy million stars.” Even for people who ignore customer reviews as a rule, the thread is well worth a read — and might even contain a few tidbits of non-sarcastic information.

Artists and designers have long embraced pen-based devices, such as those made by Wacom, which use tablets to translate your drawings into high-quality digital artwork. Wacom’s tools have brought professional quality to normal Joes, but some customers want something else out of a digi-pen — or at least, that’s what electronics companies hope. They’ve experimented with items like the Chatpen, which claimed to send SMS or email directly from what you wrote manually. They’ve built phones into them for wannabe Dick Tracys. Currently, there are two standouts among pen gizmos that don’t require computers to do their thing. The $50 FLY Fusion, which emphasizes built-in homework help, says it can record what you’re writing and do everything from spell-checking to translating to French or Spanish. The Pulse Smartpen ($150 to $200) has higher- and post-educational users in mind, offering to make MP3 recordings of a lecture or interview that are automatically linked to your ink-on-paper notes. Both require special paper to work their wonders, meaning that you’re not able, as one might assume, to simply slip all that helpful computer power into your shirt pocket and go.