The makers of MagicJack have, for years now, implored you in late-night infomercials to ditch your telephone company landland and use their product instead. Their device, about the size of a deck of playing cards, connects to a computer on one end and to a regular telephone on the other. With a MackJack thusly installed a user can place any phone call over an internet connection; calls to or within the U.S. are completely free.

(Or course, what MagicJack doesn’t tell you in their infomercials is that theirs isn’t the only internet telephony service. See our comparison of MagicJack, Skype and Vonage. Ooma also has a VoIP product that’s more expensive but otherwise superior to MagicJack’s).

Starting in the spring of 2010 MagicJack will be expanding their competitive sights to the cell phone companies. A new MagicJack device will allow users to use their mobiles to make and receive free calls.

This new MagicJack has received a great deal of press. The AP even ran an article titled MagicJack’s next act: disappearing cell phone fees.

But will the new MagicJack really let you ditch your cell phone company?

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Depending on what source you believe, it will be called the iSlate or the MacPad or the iTablet or the MacBook Tablet.

It will have a touchscreen that will be 7 inches diagonally. Or 10 inches. Or 11 inches.

The device will be a piece of junk that will cause a massive crash in Apple’s stock price, recently pumped up by the tablet netbook rumors. Or it will be a revolutionary must-have item that will create a whole new product category, spell the end of the competitor’s netbooks and e-reading devices and propel Apple to still greater heights.

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There’s been a lot of press about the race to replace the internal combustion engine in automobiles. What’s gone less noticed is that motorcycles are undergoing their own paradigm shift. Your next two-wheeled ride may be powered by an electric motor, hydrogen fuel cells or even solar power. Here’s a look at eight especially cool, environmentally-friendly, motorcycles in various phases of development:

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Obtaining one will set you back $25 million—cheap considering that a single module can power about 20,000 homes

A remote town in Africa, an automobile manufacturing plant and the Smith family next door are among the entities that may soon be able to join the United States, Japan and France on the list of those who have a nuclear power plant.

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One of the best ways to foresee what’s coming down the gadget pike is to check out company patent filings. Though, of course, a patent for a product being filed doesn’t automatically mean the product will become reality.

With that caveat we bring you this bit of cool news: according to the excellent website Nintendo World Report a patent has been filed for a Wii interactive football controller.

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Compared to a car, a motorcycle is cheaper and more energy efficient. That’s what happens when you cut the number of wheels in half, from four to two. But what if you cut the number of wheels in half again, from two to one?

A decade ago the idea of a motorized unicycle might have been the subject for a gag article on The Onion. Even if it were possible to keep balanced while riding a motorunicycle it wouldn’t be possible to go much faster than walking speed (or to turn, or to stop) without falling down.

Then the Segway personal transporter came along. The Segway showed how gyroscopes can be used not only to maintain balance on a moving object but to control it through shifts in the rider’s body weight.

Here’s a look at two motorunicycles. Or at least they appear to be motorized unicycles at first glance. In fact, each makes use of an additional wheel (though in different ways). And neither makes use of a traditional combustion engine.

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There’s been a clear design trend towards cell phones with screens that occupy an increasingly large percentage of a device’s surface area. (Just compare the screen size of the BlackBerry Storm, for example, with the similarly sized BlackBerry models from a few years ago).

Might this trend towards having more glass on the front of a cell phone lead to more glass on the back and sides too?

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The Transition is fueled by the same unleaded gasoline used by your typical earth-bound car.

The reality in 2009 is not the future people envisioned in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Where’s our colony on Mars?! Where’s our talking robots that will do all our household chores? Where’s our flying cars?!

We’re still far off from building a city on another planet. The closest we’ve coming to affordable chore-performing robots are the Looj and Rumba. But the flying car is no longer science fiction.

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