Most useful of all is AOL 9's free voice chat, which allows you to have a real, two-way conversation, just like on the phone, between any two microphone-equipped PCs running AOL 9, anywhere in the world. This even worked over a dial-up connection -- and it connected perfectly on the first try.

AOL 9's parental controls catch up to Microsoft's MSN in one crucial aspect: A parent can grant a kid access to a requested Web site through a Web interface instead of the AOL software.

A much-improved calendar allows shared and subscribed scheduling -- two friends can put each other's social appointments on their separate calendars, and a sports fan can get a team's home-game schedule added to his calendar automatically. But this doesn't yet work with "webcal" calendars published outside of AOL.

Software to synchronize your AOL calendar and address book with handheld organizers or Palm Desktop, Outlook or Outlook Express is available in test form, with a final release later this month. An address-card sharing option is further off, as is "AOL Journals," a Web-log creation tool kit.

All these changes appear in a freshened interface. AOL 9's tool bar includes new animated icons and a scrolling list of favorite places, and its Welcome screen can be replaced with a more useful, less ad-rich "QuickView" option. Unfortunately, the address bar now interprets many AOL keywords as Web search queries, so getting to a desired AOL area may take an extra click.

Some long-standing AOL usability flaws are intact in this release -- the profusion of windows within the AOL screen, the awkward integration of Microsoft Internet Explorer, clumsy and inflexible message-board views, and the need to keep entering your Zip code to get personalized info from the service when AOL knows where you live.

The biggest flaw of AOL 9, however, isn't the software, but how you're supposed to connect to it.

Dial-up users can be content with AOL 9, thanks to a modem-acceleration feature that works reasonably well at quickly presenting text-centric pages. But AOL 9 lacks any decent broadband upgrades.

In the D.C. area, AOL's only high-speed offering is a $54-a-month, Verizon-run digital-subscriber-line service. The same basic connection, but with MSN software, is available directly from Verizon for $35 a month.

It would be cheaper to get that service (or any of the other $40-ish DSL and cable options available) and pay $15 a month for AOL's "Bring Your Own Access" plan -- but the need to deal with two providers and two sets of software negates AOL's all-in-one simplicity, and you then waste money on duplicate e-mail accounts.

Competing Internet providers, meanwhile, now offer their own, easy-to-use interfaces, and some even do a decent job of duplicating AOL's best feature: ensuring that, wherever you log in, you still get your own mail, settings and bookmarks. Until America Online provides a competitive broadband offering, it's going to remain on the wrong side of some evolutionary shifts in the market, and shinier software can't help that problem.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.