Bethany Condra, 21, was wrapping up her junior year at the University of New Hampshire when disaster struck: She damaged her laptop beyond repair. With term papers and finals looming, her stepdad, a software developer, suggested she get Apple s iPad instead because, he said, it seemed just the same as a laptop. Condra took the plunge and dropped $500 on the tablet device.

A laptop it wasn t. Condra enjoyed reading "The Canterbury Tales" in vivid color, complete with lifelike page flips and she loved carrying a 1.5-pound tablet instead of a computer and a load of clunky textbooks. But typing notes on the touchscreen felt tar-pit slow. Condra had to buy a docking station (another $69) so she could type a Western civilization paper on a normal keyboard. And without a special app to connect the iPad to a printer, she had to e-mail that paper to herself and print it in the library. With senior year under way, Condra still isn t fully committed. If note-taking still feels clumsy, she says, I ll go back to writing stuff down.

It s been 20 years since computers became more than a curiosity on campus and at least a decade since the cell phone became as commonplace as the logo sweatshirt. But now college students and, of course, parents who may be footing the bill have a new wave of tech decisions to make. A host of recording and transcribing gadgets offer to bridge the divide between the spoken word (Professor So-and-So s lecture) and the written one (that paper Junior has to write). Lightweight netbooks are positioning themselves as a back-strain-free alternative to laptops. And even more potentially popular is the wave of e-readers and tablet computers, including the heavy-hitting iPad, which devotees laud as a computer and a textbook library rolled into one.

The college climate certainly gives electronics manufacturers a lot to salivate over. Student tech spending seems immune to a sluggish economy: College students spent $13 billion on electronics in 2009, up 17 percent from 2008, according to the National Retail Federation. Analysts say that having grown up in the Facebook generation, today s undergrads put a premium on gear that s both fully wireless and as small as possible. To play to that audience and add a wow factor, colleges are incorporating new devices into their coursework: At the University of New Mexico, for example, students in a Spanish course use iPod Touches to communicate with virtual characters (en Espa ol) to solve a murder mystery. At the same time, the industry is making pitches to price-conscious families. Retailers are touting $400 netbooks as cheaper paper-writing options than $700 laptops. E-reader manufacturers, fresh off their own summer price war, are also waving the economizing banner; digital-textbook seller CourseSmart says its titles cost, on average, just 60 percent as much as the paper equivalents.

Still, when it comes to the basics of the college experience reading, listening and writing even the new devices biggest fans admit that it s too early for undergrads to put all their faith in the technology. E-readers and the textbook industry are still in the awkward-dating phase of the relationship, with e-books making up only 3 percent of the course materials students use, according to the National Association of College Bookstores in part because those devices display graphics and page numbers inconsistently (if at all). Voice-recognition software can capture a lecture with more than 80 percent accuracy but the missing amount can often include crucial info like proper names and technical terms. And perhaps most significantly, note-taking and essay-writing on smaller touchscreen devices remain a clumsy enterprise. Tablets like the iPad don t quite have it nailed yet, says Bret Ingerman, vice president for computing and information services at Vassar College.

That said, it may be only a matter of time before they iron out those kinks. Certain colleges are already betting their students tuition money on a more tech-heavy future, investing in wireless data networks so the new wave of devices doesn t bog down Internet access. At Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., incoming freshmen are given an Apple MacBook Pro and iPad for free but pay technology fees of $1,000 a year to support the infrastructure and service center. For those families who won t be getting a free gadget with their course catalog, we talked to students, educators and industry analysts and test-drove some gear ourselves. Below, some devices that might have Phi Beta Kappa potential.

Smart Pens

Best Option: The Livescribe 2GB Pulse ($130)
Best to Avoid: Pens that require purchases of refill paper

Digital pens rely on a built-in camera and special paper that lets the user download handwritten notes to a computer. The bulky pens can feel cumbersome like trying to write with the handle of a spatula and some models have a reputation for glitches in the handwriting-to-digital translation. But in tests by the Information Technology Institute, students preferred note-taking with the pens to using a computer. Livescribe also says its redesigned model, the Echo, is less chunky.

Portable Computers

Best Option: Dell Inspiron 14R ($640)
Best to Avoid: Netbooks

Early adopters of the pint-size netbooks say they re too small for comfortable heavy use (think cramped keyboards). But there s such a thing as too much computer: Campus tech specialists say many students buy more memory and processing power than they need. An Inspiron with 4 gigabytes of RAM and a 320-gigabyte hard drive enough memory to get through four years of college, experts say costs $270 less than one with twice the memory and storage.

Internet Hot Spots

Best Option: Clear Spot 4G ($100, plus $40 a month)
Best to Avoid: Phone companies devices

coverage areas can be found at www.clear.com.

E-Readers

Best Option: EnTourage eDGe ($549)
Best to Avoid: The Kindle

Students have been critical of e-readers so-so graphics and their lack of other software functions. (A spokesperson for Amazon.com, maker of the top-selling Kindle, says it s in the process of responding to such feedback.) The eDGe tackles these issues by going big, with two screens that open to face each other. Users can read and annotate a text on a color LCD screen on one side while Web surfing on the other. One drawback: It s much heavier than most e-readers.