Now that mission has run its course: This will be the last Gadget Freak. So now is a very good time to tell you what I've learned about what makes a gadget truly great.

It was a typical Saturday morning, and my children were swinging nunchuks at each other again. Though my son and daughter go medieval on each other several times a day, I wasn't worried. They were just using the Wii.

The Wii's success is truly phenomenal. All but dead in the console race three years ago, Nintendo is now leaving Sony and Microsoft in the dust. (In July, Nintendo sold more Wii consoles than Sony did PlayStation 3s or Microsoft did Xbox 360s combined, The NPD Group reports.) The biggest reason, aside from its low price: its easily mastered, gesture-based interface.

Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 both provide great game play with stunning graphics and the opportunity to mosh online with other gaming dweebs. But do these devices offer enough to nongamers to serve as the command center of our digital homes? I'm not convinced.

Organic light-emitting diodes--OLEDs--employ a thin layer of organic material that emits light when electricity passes through it. OLED displays need no backlight, so they're ultrathin and flexible. They are also brighter, cheaper to manufacture, and more environmentally friendly than plasma displays or LCDs. Over the next few years, OLED will be coming to a boob tube near you, and later maybe to the walls of your house, or even the windshield of your car.

What's unique about these gizmos is that they maintain a constant Internet connection, so I don't have to load a browser, wait for a connection, and then hunt down information on a tiny screen. They simply pull down data and present it to me when I ask for it.

I want an easy, affordable, wireless way to move audio and video around my home. For years, the consumer electronics industry has promised us exactly this technological advance--in fact, the "wireless HD streaming demo" has become a Consumer Electronics Show cliche. But the show fades from memory, and we remain tangled in a wired/plastic world. Frankly, I'm tired of it.

You can have your plasmas and LCDs, your CRTs and rear-projection DLPs. When it comes to watching a really big picture on the wall, I'll take a front-projector TV, thanks. Dollar for dollar and inch for inch, these models are the cheapest big-screen televisions you can buy.

In fact, we never go to the movies anymore. Instead, we park ourselves on the couch, eating real buttered popcorn and basking in the welcoming glow of our 100-inch monster screen.

The United States leads the world in operating systems, Web 2.0 startups, and drunken teenage starlets. When it comes to cell phones, however, we might as well be Albania. With the exception of the iPhone, a truly game-changing (yet flawed) piece of technology, all the cool handsets appear first in Europe and Asia.

The main reason why we lag: Because people in Europe and Asia are more dependent on their cell phones than on their PCs, high-speed mobile broadband service has developed much faster. Buying a handset overseas is a lot like buying a computer--you can mix and match models and service providers. Here we're still mostly locked in to one carrier per device.

For example: The Nissan OneOne will pick up your dry cleaning or drop the children off at school--no driver required. GM-OnStar's ANT will feature an onboard quantum computer, use car-to-car communications to avoid traffic jams, and fold up like a piece of origami when parked.

My iPod Mini was dead. It had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible.

Well, the screen still worked. But the battery wouldn't hold a charge. And when I popped in the headphones, it produced an ear-piercing screech not unlike a Ted Nugent guitar solo.

In 2008 you'll see more devices connecting to the Internet and to one another. Expect your next portable media player to have a browser and Wi-Fi built in, à la the iPod Touch or the Archos 605, says analyst Rob Enderle, principal for The Enderle Group.

"If you had spent $5000 on this thing, you'd be shopping for a lawyer," she warned, with a look that said Don't Even Try to Sweet-Talk Your Way Out of This.