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1. Wired Video on Demand

The Buzz: "In 20 years, you'll be receiving most of your media over the Net," says Steve Shannon, founder of Akimbo, a service that delivers videos as downloads for $10 per month. That day might come sooner than Shannon predicts: RealNetworks and Starz have launched a $13-per-month subscription service that uses the Internet's pipes to pump movies to your PC; MovieLink offers downloadable flicks for $5 or less a pop; and TiVo will offer streaming video sometime in the future. Akimbo, slated for a summer launch, will send content to set-top boxes, and even the stodgy old BBC has announced a pilot program to make its broadcasts available online. All of these services require fast connections, and though download times for a movie can range from 15 minutes to an hour or more, you can start watching the video as soon as there's a reasonable buffer--say, 5 to 10 minutes or so.

Bottom Line: Today 25 million homes have broadband connections, and the cost of delivering video online has dropped to about 50 cents a gigabyte. That combination makes IP-based video unstoppable.

2. IPod Killer

The Buzz: Creative's new Zen Touch, a hard-drive-based MP3 player that manages to sustain a staggering 24-hour battery life, may be the most drool-worthy addition of the season. The slick unit has 20GB of disk space (that's enough room for 10,000 songs in WMA format or 5000 in MP3) as well as a touch-sensitive control pad that rivals the IPod's. Even better, the player boasts remarkable sound quality (97dB signal-to-noise ratio) and costs $269--$130 less than a 20GB IPod.

Bottom Line: Zen is all about letting go of worldly desires. But this Zen has me saying, "I want it, I want it, I want it!"

3. Firefox Turns 1.0

The Buzz: We've mentioned Firefox (no relation) before in PC World, but with the release of version 1.0 around the corner, the open-source browser graduates from toy for alpha geeks to mainstream productivity tool. This polished, cross-platform browser makes migration from IE a snap. The elegant Firefox interface disposes of Web nuisances, from pop-ups to spyware, and adding functionality via extensions is effortless.

Bottom Line: XP Service Pack 2 may offer a few updates to IE, but Firefox is where the innovation is happening.

4. Dualing Chips

The Buzz: It won't arrive until mid-2005, but AMD has designed a 64-bit, dual-core Opteron--two processor cores on a single chip. Intel has dual-core plans, too, but AMD should be first to market. The cores communicate with each other at CPU frequency, so they're fast. To take advantage of the dual-core architecture, you need multiprocessor-aware apps; if they're multithreaded and CPU-intensive (like CAD or databases), all the better.

Bottom Line: These chips will hit servers first, but you may get a supercharged desktop sooner than you think.