Note to designers and gadget manufacturers: Some of us are sick and tired of candy-colored MP3 players, cameras and cell phones.

Apple's announcement that the new iPod nano will come in silver, black, blue, green and red and the shuffle will come in silver, mint green, turquoise, lavender and magenta (those are my descriptions of the colors, not theirs!) got me thinking about the fact that almost all gadgets in the US are either staple colors like white, silver and black or bright — almost juvenile — hues of red, blue, pink and green.

Where, my friends, are all the fall colors like orange and yellow, or the muted, retro colors? I was scanning through a catalog for the Japanese mobile communication company KDDI and was floored by its amazing color selection for Toshiba, Panasonic and Casio phones. I'm not asking for a full array of pantone colored cell phones, I'd just like a little more variety. I know someone is spending millions of dollars on market research, but I just can't believe I am the only American who would prefer a "jewelry gold," "fresco orange" or "palmer brown" cell phone to sorbet colored ones?

The late David Packard, founder with William Hewlett of the Hewlett Packard Company, was born on September 7, 1912.

Though we may focus on HP's printers, computers and celebrity driven "The Computer Is Personal Again" ad campaign, HP's first product was a resistance-capacitance audio oscillator based on a design developed by Hewlett when he was in graduate school.

Wired Magazine acknowledges HP as the producer of the world's first personal computer, in 1968, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as David's brother Bill Hewlett said: "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." That my friends, was your history lesson for the day.

Photo courtesy of HP.

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Wouldn't you agree that this iPod accessory mimics the traditional camera with tripod set-up? Recently announced by Focal Corp Japan, this three-legged Boomtune Mini speaker system, which by the way is named "Julia," connects to the iPod via a 3.5mm stereo plug. Straight from New Launches, two of the tripod legs come with speakers while the third operates as the battery compartment. Unfortunately there isn't a docking station, which I've certainly grown accustomed to and quite frankly can't live without! Currently available from Japan for 4480 Yen or $39.