Fifty years ago, many believed that technological marvels like housekeeping robots, videophones and flying cars would be common elements of the 21st century home. Our lives may not exactly resemble an episode of the cartoon The Jetsons, but technology still impacts our lives more than it ever has. For instance, many of today's daily household activities -- such as cooking dinner in three minutes with a microwave and spending an evening at home using a personal computer to browse a vast, public network called the Internet -- seemed like fantasies just a few decades ago.
To offer a taste of how technology might continue to change our lives inside our homes in the near future, we reviewed a handful of cutting-edge devices that enable you to keep tabs on how much electricity you're using (P3 Kill A Watt Electricity Monitor), use one keyboard for multiple computers (OmniView 2-Port KVM Switch), keep your PCs up and running during a power outage (APC Smart-UPS 420VA), and connect multiple PCs using the power lines in your house (Phonex's NeverWire 14) or no lines at all (SMC Networks Barricade 4-Port 11Mbps Wireless Broadband Router). We hope you'll find our reviews informative, and perhaps they'll cause you to wonder just how technology will change our homes and lives in another 50 years.
