Game controllers come in many forms - so why not an exercise bike? The Smart Cycle from Fisher-Price is a child-size stationary bicycle that hooks up to a TV. The idea is to get your preschooler off the floor and pedaling to drive over letters on the screen while avoiding potholes.

Once the bike is assembled - four D batteries are required - it is plugged into the audio and video inputs on a TV. A child can steer down a virtual street, matching letters, numbers or shapes, or steering into a pit stop to play one of six early learning games with the onboard joystick. One game, called Number Fields, is like whack-a-mole with numerals, while Letter Creek involves zapping letters as they flow down a stream, spelling out words.

The bike will be available this summer for $100 from major toy retailers. Additional software cartridges ($20) will feature Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob, Hot Wheels and Barbie.

While the Smart Cycle's music and graphics are quite simple compared with a typical computer game, any toy that can blend TV with mental and physical education can only be a good thing. Perhaps there will be a version for grown-ups.

- WARREN BUCKLEITNERNOW, BLU-RAY STORAGE FOR MAC USERSBlu-ray discs can hold 50 gigabytes of data, making a regular DVD seem cramped. They can also make life easier for digital photographers, video editors or anybody else who needs to stash big files on a recordable disc.

For those who don't want to drag around an external Blu-ray drive with their Macintosh laptops, Fastmac recently released an internal slot-loading Blu-ray drive that replaces the DVD drive.

Fastmac's Blu-ray drive works with several recent Macintosh laptop models, as well as the iMac and Mac Mini desktop systems. A list of compatible Macs and full technical specifications are at www.fastmac.com , which is also an online store.

Several third-party programs, including Roxio Toast 8 Titanium and Adobe Premiere CS3, can actually do the Blu-ray disc burning on the Mac once the drive is installed. The drive's $800 price is steep, but that will eventually edge downward. For now, early adopters can record data not only to Blu-ray discs, but also to standard recordable DVD and CD media as well.

Sadly, the early adopters will not be able to watch Blu-ray movies on their Macs. Fastmac says several companies are working on the software to do this.

- J.D. BIERSDORFERNOT LIGHT, BUT WORTH A LOOKIt would be impossible to build one computer to please everyone, but Toshiba's new Satellite A205-S4617 notebook sure takes a whack at it. It is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.66 gigahertz and has 2 gigabytes of RAM, which is what you need to run all the features of Windows Vista's Home Premium edition.

The computer has four USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port. Toshiba says it set the USB ports far enough apart to accommodate bulky devices that would normally block the use of the adjacent port.

For audiophiles, the S4617 has built-in Harman Kardon speakers. The 15.4-inch screen is in the 16:9 format that is favored for viewing and editing high-definition widescreen video, and it has a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. To help the budding filmmaker handle all that video, the unit comes with a 250-gigabyte hard drive. The 5-in-1 media reader can handle the most common storage cards used in digital cameras and camcorders.

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