All mySimon Back to School Shopping Picks

How do you carry your lunch to work/school? Leaky Tupperware containers? Multi-knotted Safeway bags? Make leftovers/soggy tuna sandwiches more fun with a lunch tote from Lands' End. There are several plain adult totes that look pretty useful, but our favorite is the kiddie character lunch tote, shown here in dog but also available in horse, ballet slippers, and polar bear. The totes are insulated to keep food fresh for hours; have enough room for... more

With an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a big 320GB hard drive, the Dell Studio S1535-125B laptop, at $980, offers students and mainstream home users some serious bang for the buck. The laptop has a 15.4 screen, a 2-megapixel webcam for Internet chatting, Bluetooth, 4 USB ports, and Vista Home Premium. And it's Dell, so you get toll-free phone support. The downside: It weighs 6.1 pounds and has just... more

What's even better than the Boyfriend pillow? The Snoogle body pillow. Not just for pregnant women, the Snoogle is a 5-foot-long pillow that conforms to your body and has a removable, washable cover. Depending on how you bend it, you can use the Snoogle to support your back, align your hips/neck/spine/legs, elevate parts of your body, use it to support your neck or back while reading, and more. Just looking at it makes... more

Keep your favorite books organized with these upturned hand bookends. Made from weighted resin, they're a great way to store books, magazines, CDs, or DVDs. Or forget the books, etc. altogether and display them with the palms facing outward, as if they're saying halt! or hi there! Pick up a pair for yourself and a pair for your favorite book club member. $32 at Chiasso. More bookends.

Get hot coffee whenever you want it with the Hamilton Beach BrewStation. It brews up to 12 cups internally - no carafe to clean (or break), no coffee getting cold or burned, no waste. The one-handed dispensing function lets one hand fill your thermos as the other reaches for your keys on the way out the door. The BrewStation also has a programmable clock and timer, so you can wake up to the smell... more

This HP printer doesn't look like much, and that's exactly the point. It can crank out 18 laser-quality black and white pages a minute, and 12 color pages a minute, and can also handle borderless 4 x 6 color prints, but its footprint is small enough (16.6 wide and 5.5 deep) so you can stash it on a bookshelf or under your desk, saving work surface area for more important things like coffee cups... more

New from Pandigital: PanTouch digital photo frames, so named because they use touchscreen controls instead of actual buttons. Available in 7, 8, and 10.4 sizes, the frames hold up to 4000 photos and offer 128MB - 512MB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth compatibility, built-in memory card readers, USB 2.0 ports for direct connection to PCs or cameras, and support for MP3s and video clips. We're still content to use our digital photos as desktop... more

We get so tired of telling people to mind their own business when we're trying to update our Facebook profiles in the coffee shop. Maybe we need these Targus laptop privacy filters. When you stick one of these screens, which look like tiny vertical blinds, onto your laptop display, nosy neighbors won't be able to see what you're typing - or, ahem, what sites you're visiting. Targus says these screens also block glare and... more

Cute, warm, comfortable, and on sale! These UGG Cardy knit boots regularly cost $140, but you can get the at the semi-annual Nordstrom Anniversary Sale for $99.90. The boots fold up and down (they're down in this photo), so it's almost like getting 2 pairs of fall boots for $100.

You'd think today this summer was the Second Coming of something other than the iPhone, the way bloggers are babbling about it. But if you don't want to shell out $200 for the new iPhone, or if you're already a Sprint customer, you might want to take a look at the $130 Samsung Instinct. The 3G phone offers a touchscreen display, web browser, Bluetooth, integrated GPS, 2-megapixel camera, text and multimedia messaging, and music... more

We don't write about many status watches here because a) they all look the same to us, b) we can't afford them anyway, and c) in this economy, who would spend thousands of dollars on a watch? No, we prefer to call your attention to affordable watches with more interesting designs. For example: Vans watches. We had no idea the shoe company did accessories. The Bay Blocks '80s-looking model shown here comes in several... more

The problem with so many laptop bags is their size. And weight. And price. And appearance. OK, so we have a few issues ever since we bought a cheap Targus laptop briefcase at Ross Dress For Less and found it more trouble than it was worth going through airport security, whacking people in the aisles on the plane, and maneuvering that and a suitcase through Grand Central Station. Next time we travel we're taking this... more

New from JVC: A clock radio and iPod speaker that accommodates 2 iPods (or iPhones), side by side, and is still only 13 wide. You can switch back and forth between iPod A and iPod B, but there's no mention of being able to play both at the same time. There's an illuminate strip under each iPod dock that you can set to display 1 of 9 colors. Other features include an AM/FM tuner,... more

In high school we made home movies with a camcorder that was the size of a microwave oven, and probably cost our parents a fortune. It's nice to see that (unlike gas) some things are getting more affordable. The $100 RCA point-and-shoot Small Wonder camcorder is competing with both the Flip and the Creative Vado in the pocket-sized camcorder market. The Small Wonder has a 1.5 flip-out LCD display (the Vado's display... more