This week on Gearlog Radio, with hosts Robyn Peterson and Sascha Segan: Apple WWDC announcements, back-to-school -- maybe without your cell phone; and lots more chatter!

Download the MP3.

On this week's show:

• Editor, Reviews for PC Magazine Lance Ulanoff takes a huge amount of ribbing throughout for his mature years (well, "mature" compared with Robyn and Sascha);
• Joel, lead analyst for desktop PCs, talks about Apple's announcements from the WWDC; they said nothing about the iPod, but we've got some strong opinions already about the Mac Pro and OS X (Leopard);
• Sascha is perplexed by the nearly useless Sony Mylo;
• Jen talks about gadgets that can help students going back to school (all too soon), including... a disco ant farm;
• Dan tells us why banning cell phones in schools is just, well, stupid;
• Online intern Errol Pierre-Louis joins the back-to-school discussion, since he is the only person we know who is actually going back to school.

Hosts: Robyn Peterson and Sascha Segan

Panelists: Jen DeLeo, Lance Ulanoff , Joel Santo Domingo, Dan Costa, Errol Pierre-Louis
Audio Engineer: Scott Bernstein

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Okay, so maybe a Monster Laptop Sleeve won't scare off spam or prevent your Dell notebook from exploding, but it's so cute I couldn't resist telling you about it.

Hand-made by Katie from BarrysFarm.com, this Cookie Monster-looking laptop sleeve comes in blue, red, green, and purple for laptops 12 to 17 inches. Opening the sleeve reveals the monster's red fangs. (But don't feed it cookies!)

Each Monster Laptop Sleeve sells for $65 and takes up to 10 business days to ship. You can't beat the price for an accessory that's made-to-order!

[via Gizmodiva.com] 

Danger, danger, Will Robinson! You're about to go into serious credit-card debt, because you'll definitely want one of these. A company called B9Creations LLC is offering a "Full Size, Limited Edition, Fully Licensed Replicas of this amazing TV Icon!", said icon being the Robot B9 from the sixties' TV show, "Lost in Space." And it's yours for just $24,500. 

The list of features on the company's site is exhaustive. Here are just a few: a "laser cut steel brain with polished stainless steel top cover and crown," a 240-watt stereo sound system, many animated parts (finger lights, torso rotation), a "discreet" remote control (he's not a true robot, folks -- sorry), and lots of articulation ("claws, rotate open and close in sync"). You can even pull out B9's power pack, and he'll shut down with an "aaaggghhh" sound, just the way he did on TV.

Sadly, the site reports that it can only build 30 to 50 of these guys a year, and right now, its reservation list is full. If you've got a spare 25K burning up your bank account, though, you can contact the company to see if anyone's dropped off the list.

Thanks to reader Dennis Wilbur for this tip!

Gizmodo reports that the Stiletto 100 should be available in September: They saw it listed in the Crutchfield catalog with specs and pix. The Stiletto 100 is Sirius Satellite Radio's first portable player to have an integrated antenna in the included headset for real-time reception. The device will also be able to store and play up to 100 hours of your MP3 or WMA music files. It'll be Wi-Fi enabled for music streaming, come with two batteries (one standard, and one extended life, which offers 4 hours of live Sirius reception, 14 hours of Wi-Fi, and 22 hours of stored playback time), and retail for $400 through Crutchfield (no info yet on costs at other retailers).

Will we like this as much as we liked the neat little portable player/receivers XM came out with a couple months ago, the Samsung Helix and Pioneer Inno? As soon as our audio analyst, Mike Kobrin, gets one in for review, we'll let you know.

1981 was a very popular year. Not only was a girl named Jennifer born, that's when MTV first debuted, PC Magazine was launched, and Ronald Reagan became President. But the most important thing to come out of 1981, IMHO, was IBM's introduction of the PC.

Wow. I'm as old as the PC. So far, all of my bits and bytes are still working!

Released on August 12, 1981, the PC consisted of a 16-bit microprocessor, 12 font styles, and 8 background colors, but no mouse or hard drive. It sold for $1,565 at ComputerLand and Sears.

My first computer as a kid was the Commodore 64, and I remember that I was so jealous that my older cousin owned the Commodore 128. And now look at what computers today can do! Not to mention how profitable the computer industry is. According to PCMag.com, the industry is worth $200 billion dollars, and a total of 580 million computers have been sold in the U.S. alone.

In the next five years, it is predicted that total PC sales will reach $1.3 billion. Simply amazing.

Around a month ago, we told you about the exploding laptop at Dell's press conference in Japan. Turns out it wasn't a fluke; ouch. For details and to find out what to do if your Dell is one of the affected laptops, see the indepth story at PCMag.com.

And here's a  link to Dell's recall statement on its site.

(At left is PC Magazine editor-in-chief Jim Louderback checking all the notebooks on our Lab benches to see which have Sony batteries.)