Basically, there’s one fairly affordable satellite email system that I know of, and that’s the ORBCOMM-based Skymate. A sub-$1,000 black-box attaches to your computer and a VHF antenna, to send and receive text-only email, and download weather reports. It also serves as a position reporting system, and can be configured with sensors to monitor the condition (i.e. water in the bilges, electrical system, etc.) as well as the location of your boat. Pricing is per character transmitted, ranging from a $16/month plan for 8,000 characters sent and received, to $70/month for 50,000 characters. By way of comparison, this article is about 1,500 characters (not including pictures). Coverage is fairly extensive, but there are some big holes in the Southern hemisphere, including the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, so circumnavigators will be disappointed. And there is an additional $15 charge for usage beyond the coastal waters of the U.S. and Canada. A couple of nice details: you can change the monthly plan as needed; and you can keep you Skymate email address active and retrieve messages via a web interface for $5/month when you are not using the satellite service.
The really nice feature, though, is weather downloads, but they can eat into your characters/month budget quickly, with reports ranging from about 300 to 3000 characters. In the Nobeltec booth at the big boat show in Miami, they were demonstrating overlays of Skymate weather downloads on navigation charts—basically creating a service similar to the XM WX product mentioned a few days ago. No info on the Skymate or Nobeltec website, yet, but something to look forward to.
At the Miami Boatshow I talked with the U.S. distributor for Engel, and asked him about the availability of the stainless version pictured 
It’s not a widely known technology to pleasure boaters yet, but AIS, or Automatic Identification System, is a maritime transponder system that is rapidly becoming mandatory for commercial vessels. Ship’s names, positions, and various other vital statistics are digitally encoded and automatically transmitted via VHF, so that they can be monitored by vessel traffic controllers, and anyone with the proper receiver. In fact, it’s very similar to the latest DSC equipped VHF radios. And it’s not inconceivable that pleasure boats may one day be required to carry AIS transponders as well. While McMurdo makes full systems for commercial vessels, including the radios and chartplotter to display locations and data from other AIS equipped ships, SI-TEX had a more pleasure-boat-oriented, though pre-release vessel tracking product in their booth. A simple display rather than a full chartplotter, it identified vessels and their positions relative to your location. Knowing the name of a ship bearing down on your boat might help raise them on the VHF, and might offer some recourse in identifying those not operated in a safe manner. Unfortunately there was no brochure, nor was I able to find any information about the product on their website.
One interesting consequence of the prevalence of AIS in commercial shipping, is that there is now a website where subscribers can monitor the movements of all the ships within certain geographic areas, and set alarms for when a particular ship arrives in port, a feature of interest to shippers and those expecting a container or two of goods they might need to make room for. 
In the Caribbean a couple years ago, I remember seeing beautiful stainless steel dinghy anchors at 
Okay, not everything I saw at the show was electronic. These deckplates for one, which instead of the familiar screw or snap in action, have a kind of T-bar on the bottom, and a screw mechanism which pulls the deckplate tight, compressing a gasket with the surface. They can be mounted on a bare hole—no external mounting ring is needed—so installation is very simple. They are robust enough that I’m considering them for bulkhead access to watertight crash compartments on Sweet Destiny. There are 8, 10, and 12 inch circular models (opening dimension is 1.25 inches smaller), and an 11.25 by 21.25 rectangular version. They are available directly from Armstrong, (800-226-7204).
One filler topic that’s been coming up in the magazines in the last couple years is NMEA 2000, the replacement for the old familiar NMEA serial standard for connecting marine electronics. Yes, the old standard has been around since the 80s, and it shows, but instead of working together, most of the marine electronics companies have been intent on creating their own proprietary systems, hoping to lock you into buying a whole boatload of their gear. Raymarine’s Seatalk and HSB networks would be good examples. One company got tired of waiting around for NMEA 2000 to take off, and has produced a line of gear including instruments, sensors, cabling and connectors, and even a diagnostic tool for verifying installations. And the equipment is impressive. I was especially taken with their $900 multi-data display, a large, high resolution LCD instrument capable of showing several panels of numeric and graphic data simultaneously. It can even be set to automatically cycle through a set of data pages. While Maretron is currently short a wind transducer, this one display could replace a whole bank of instruments. The solid-state, rate gyro heading sensor is also interesting, as is the waterproof and robust cabling system. I wish this company well for spear-heading this open standard effort, and producing what look to be some very nice products.