This year many such devices will finally be rolling out. But just because it's a good concept doesn't mean that each entry will be worth buying. Some, perhaps many, will be failures. I intend to judge them case by case, and so should consumers.

First UP this year is a promising device from Netpliance, a start-up company in Austin, Texas. It's the first full-functional, full-color desktop internet appliance to hit the market. It goes by the ungainly name of i-Opener and costs $199, plus $21.95 a month for the internet hook-up. If you are interested, however, you should move fast, because the price rises to $299 starting Sunday. The i-Opener is currently sold only at the Netpliance web site, www.netpliance.com or by phone at 1-800-iopener. In a few weeks, the company says, it will be on sale at Circuit City stores.The i-Opener is small enough and good-looking enough to go in a kitchen, bedroom or family room. It consists of a crisp, vivid, 10-inch flat-panel color screen mounted on a plastic base via stainless-steel rods.

In front sits a small keyboard, decked out with special keys for e-mail, news, weather, shopping and the like. There's even a pizza key, which brings up the web page for a pizza-delivery company. The keyboard also contains a pointing device that's meant to replace a mouse, but it works quite badly so I recommend you order the optional mouse for $20. You can hook up a printer, but only one Canon model is compatible.

I like the i-Opener. Despite a few drawbacks, it's a good option for both novice internet users who disdain a PC and veteran PC owners who want a cheap, second internet-access device that can be used in rooms where a PC would be too large or would look out of place.

Unlike a PC, the i-Opener starts right up when you turn it on and shuts right down when you turn it off. There's no operating system to learn, no files or folders and no crashes, in my tests. It automatically dials into the internet six times a day to fetch e-mail and update its news and other content. It will also dial in whenever you call up a web page or want to check e-mail manually. If you have e-mail waiting, a light goes on.

In the Netpliance's I-Opener, the user interface is very clean and understandable, and the small screen is sharp enough to pack in at least as much of a web page as a typical PC. Using the i-Opener, I checked my stocks, ordered a book at Amazon.com and used many popular sites, including Yahoo!, The interactive journal, CNET, Slate and CNN. I was able to receive photos sent by e-mail, but not able to send photos out.

The I-Opener offers three types of web content. First, it has major channels, such as news, sports, shopping and finance, that are arrayed in a circle of icons on the home page. These are proprietary web services, produced by Netpliance, and they are updated all day so you can read relatively recent versions offline.

The second level is called the Web Guide, and it's a large collection of recommended web sites, arranged by category. The third level is the wide-open web. The i-Opener lets you go to any web site you choose, even if it's not in the Web Guide. And you can create a list of your favorite sites for future reference.All of this stuff worked well. So what are the downsides? Well, the i-Opener makes it tougher than it should be to do your own freelance web surfing.

You have to click three times from the home screen just to get to a place where you can enter a web page address that isn't listed in the machine's canned Web Guide. And that assumes that you can find the phrase "browse the Web" in tiny type at the bottom of the guide and that you can figure out that you must then click on a button called `Expand' to get the Web-address entry box to pop up. There are no keyboard buttons for going to your favorites list or for bringing up the web address box.

Netpliance wants you to use the Web Guide rather than surf on your own, because it hopes to sell spots on the Web Guide list to Web site producers. But the company says the main reason it plays down freelance Web surfing is that its first 10,000 or so users haven't used it much. Still, it says it plans to let users customise the Web Guide by adding their own favorite sites, starting in a couple of months.

The i-Opener also supports only one user, with one e-mail account. For the same monthly fee, America Online gives you seven user accounts. Netpliance says it will have a multi-user plan later this year. In addition, some sorts of Web content can not be reached with the device. Pages that use the Java programming language won't work. And the machine can not read word documents or other computer files sent as e-mail attachments. There is also no way for users to configure the machine's basic settings. For instance, the clock on my i-Opener is an hour slow, but I can't reset it. Still, this is a good way to get online without a PC and I believe that it will only get better over time.

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