When Tess Jablon heads over the hill this fall from Encino to a private West Hollywood high school, she will be packing an astonishing amount of electronic firepower--all in the palms of her hands.
The 14-year-old's $179 VTech Helio, a junior-set version of the wildly popular Palm Pilot hand-held organizer, is as powerful as most desktop computers were three years ago. And her new Nokia cellular phone could render her pager obsolete.
Tess can thus lay claim to a spot in the most plugged-in, gadget-happy generation in history. As kids head back to school, many are pleading to have the latest high-tech accouterments to tuck into their backpacks.
Many of these gadgets are extensions of desktop computers at home. A few--notably scientific calculators and laptop computers--have a clear educational use. Most other devices exist primarily to ease family communication or simply to entertain, though proponents say that students pick up valuable high-tech skills as they fiddle with the functions.
Gadget-hungry offspring depend, for the most part, on the kindness of parents to satisfy their cravings for RAM and ROM. Wireless organizers, laptops, digital cameras, CD "burners" for making custom CDs and MP3 music players (think online music pirates Napster and Gnutella) don't come cheaply.
"Our products are definitely popular with kids," said Allen Bush, a spokesman for Handspring Inc., the Silicon Valley maker of Visor hand-held organizers. "But they're not something you could save your paper route money for."
Nor are these gizmos something that schools and teachers necessarily welcome, though parents have embraced them as ways of getting in touch in emergencies with on-the-go children.
Many of the devices, in fact, are prohibited under the California state Education Code. The bans on electronic listening and recording devices and paging and signaling equipment date to the 1970s and 1980s, when early-generation gadgets were implicated in drug dealing and teachers envisioned annoying disruptions in classrooms.
As devices unthought of in those technological dark ages have proliferated, some schools have chosen to look away. Still, it is the rare, supremely confident teacher who would embrace the new micro Eyemodule camera. The device, which attaches to a Handspring Visor hand-held organizer, can snap a digital shot of the teacher and download it into a computer.
