I am on my way home from ten days in sunny Florida visiting my parents, and it was a gadget-rific Christmas. I saw my first Nook and Nook Colour, my first Kindle 3 (alas, out of stock, but I did play with a dummy model) and got stepdad’s iPad set up for him. More on that later—we had a few days alone thanks to a family emergency that had Mom flying home for a few days, so the iPad became our little All by Ourselves project—but I have some general comments on my gadget-rific holiday to tide you over in the meantime! 1) IT’S A GADGET WORLD The first thing that struck me about this holiday season was just how many gadgets there really are out there. I don’t travel much, so I was unprepared for the sheer proliferation of gadgetalia out there in the wild. I think every single person on my whole flight had a gadget of some kind, ranging from iPod Touches (most in the hands of children) to iPads, at least two Kindles besides my own, numerous fully loaded smartphones, a Sony and a few Chinese devices I could not identify. Two people in the seats beside me were even watching video on iPod Nanos! And I was not the only person who had more than one device with me, either! Of course, not all of these people were reading on them. But still, the potential is there. I spent an enjoyable afternoon playing iToys with my nephew, who is not much of a reader, and while we were evenly matched on the arcade stuff and perhaps spent more time than we had to playing with the talking cat, I have to admit that he held his own against me in even ‘intellectual’ games like Jeopardy and Family Feud. And I was happy to have something to do with him that bonded us a little. Small boys are a bit of a cipher for me, since his only interests seem to be hockey and baseball, so gadgetry is perhaps a welcome way into his world for people like me and his gadget-savvy parents. ...