NEW YORK -- At the Digital Experience tech event here, I had a chance to see the new touch pad technology coming this fall from Synaptics (NASDAQ: SYNA).

Picture a trackball that keeps spinning after its initial push or a child's matchbox car racing across the table after its windup.

That's what's ahead with touch pads as Synaptics' momentum functionality comes soon to laptops. This feature is already present on the Samsung Instinct mobile phone.

Scrolling momentum you create with just one flick of the finger will come in handy when slogging through long documents such as Excel spreadsheets.

This week the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released a study about home health care and using the Internet to communicate with your doctors online.

Can blood pressure really be monitored online? Apparently so. The patients test the blood pressure themselves and keep their doctors informed via the Web.

According to the report, self-monitoring of blood pressure by patients and reporting to doctors over the Web provides similar accuracy as in-office testing and costs patients less. Next up for AMA testing: diabetes monitoring.

How about monitoring of worker stress through the number of IMs and e-mails?

A new category of portable PCs has emerged -- call it the Netbook, Nettop, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), ultralow-cost PC.

Whatever term you choose, Asus appears to be leading the pack with its Eee PC, a low-cost 9-inch computer selling for around $250 and featuring Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) Atom microprocessor. Asus announced its new line of low-cost, portable models at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan.

What could make these PCs work is that they're cheap and potentially effective in satisfying the needs of small businesses starting out and users in developing countries as they learn how to make use of the Internet.

The unit comes with a solid-state hard drive, but many users will make use of the Web to store files and use online word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Asus says the Eee has a battery life of close to 8 hours, almost four times that of my year-old HP Pavilion laptop.

Will Netbooks replace laptops or notebooks as we know them today? Hard to tell, but these compact, portable systems are likely to sell.