Like you, I can't justify replacing the hard drive in my wife's older PC with an SSD, but I was really excited to learn about Seagate's Momentus series hybrid option. Does anyone make an equivalent 3.5" form factor SATA drive for desktops? That might be an affordable way to breath a little new life into a still-capable but older PC.

How ironic that most people use their iPhones, Blackberrys, Androids, et al for anything BUT verbally communicating. Using a telephone to actually SPEAK with another person? How quaint. The biggest problem with vocal interaction with computing devices may simply be that we're infatuated with the romantic Hollywood versions of that. Like programming seems so dynamic and cool in movies, we're not prepared for how tedious and laborious the real versions of these interactions usually are. Given that Star Trek's teleportation scheme was just a creative way for the show's prodcers to circument budgetary limitations, I suspect that voice recognition was likewise more a means of quickly moving the story along than actually depicting or predicting a useful future technology. On the handwriting tangent, ya hafta wonder why Jobs & Co. didn't build handwriting recognition into the iPad. Is it that he simply didn't see the need to compete with tablet PCs, he didn't believe it'd be successful enough, or that he views handwriting as a useless and all but dead technology?