Dusseldorf, Germany

Hamburg,

Hamburg - The iPod may be the industry leader among MP3 players, but that does not mean it's right for you.

Before any major purchase, customers should consider what they want to do with their MP3 player. Christine Tantschinez of the Stuttgart-based magazine audio says a lot depends on an individual's needs. They determine the size of the device, the pre-packaged components and the price.

"If you just want music for jogging, then go for a very simple model," she says. A display might not even be necessary and you could get away with relatively little memory - just two to four gigabytes.

Berlin - Violent computer games are sparking controversy all over the world. Legislation recently passed in Germany in July, for example, makes it easier to put such games on the banned list following the introduction of a rating index. Yet what does it all really mean? Who sets the age recommendations for "normal" games? In Germany, at least, these roles have been in flux of late.

Hamburg - It's a bit like buying property with just a building frame on it. The dimensions are predetermined, but what kind of heating to use, wood floors or tiles, how the windows should look - that's all left for the customer to decide. Barebones PCs work on the same principle. They contain only the case, power supply and motherboard. Everything else is customer selected.

While the term "Barebones" technically applies to all PCs that do not come with a complete preinstalled set-up, the term has come to take on a different meaning. Tom Seiffert from the hardwaremaker Shuttle near Hamburg notes that the term now refers to PCs with a distinctively small physical profile regardless of whether they come fully configured.

Berlin - While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as clients. They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more.