There are always moments in life when you wish you had your camera to hand. The Labs team rounds up the latest pocket cameras.

BenQs small 1.3-megapixel camera is a stylish pearl coloured affair, and is one of the tiniest cameras that PC Authority has reviewed so far (aside, coincidentally, from the BenQ 300mini we reviewed in May 2002, page 81).

The BenQ DC2300 is a 2.1-megapixel camera with 2,048 x 1,536 optical resolution, 8MB internal memory, fixed focus, and built-in flash. It stores images and video in MMC and SD card media, has a USB interface and takes AA batteries. A fairly low priced camera, the DC2300 offers white-balance modes, metering modes and exposure adjustments.

The o2 Xphone is one of the first phones in Australia to use Microsoft's new embedded SmartPhone 2003 OS, which is a highly, highly pared down and customised version of Windows XP. Anyone familiar with the Windows interface shouldn't have much trouble operating this phone. Having said that however, it does take some getting used to when navigating the menu systems, but it doesn't actually take long to get up to speed.

Offering 40GB of storage, the Iomega drive is very small for its capacity, measuring a mere 8.89 x 7.37 x 1.27cm. It weighs just over 99 grams, which means it's unnoticeable in your pocket. The internal drive is a 40GB Hitachi TravelStar C4K40 -- a new form-factor hard drive, measuring a mere 1.8 inches across (a normal notebook hard drive is 2.5in, a desktop drive 3.5) -- and only about 7mm thick.

A sexy magnesium-alloy housing gives the IXUS 400 one of the most compact camera bodies submitted this month. The bright 118,000-pixel LCD gives an excellent preview of your images or for shot placement when not using the viewfinder.

A funky set of  Bluetooth headphones. Connect to a variety of audio sources or use the built in MP3 player.

Implementing an in-car MP3 player can often mean an expensive overhaul to your audio system, or at the least buying a fiddly, cable-strewn cassette adaptor for an existing MP3 player like an iPod. This assumes that you do have an MP3 player already though.

There's one thing that's immediately noticeable and annoying about the otherwise superb Xphone II: it's incredibly slow to turn on and boot up. We clocked about 72 seconds from pressing the power button to connecting to our service, with about a minute of that taken up by just booting the phone's OS.

For a camera as packed with controls as this, Minolta has still kept the body comfortable and light. With more features than your average Boeing, this camera's menu modes are entered into with a jog dial that locks in the off position, stopping you from draining your batteries with accidental inside travel-gear shots.

The Caplio G3 is a 3.24-megapixel compact digital camera featuring a maximum optical resolution of 2,048 x 1,536, 3x zoom and auto and manual focus. It records images to 8MB of internal memory, SD or MMC media. It is capable of audio and video capture, video-out, and it can connect to a computer via USB.

The Camedia C-5050 is a 5.3-megapixel camera offering a good balance of automatic and manual settings, catering for users who like a professional look and feel. It also offers USB connectivity, separate status LCD, optical resolution of 2,560 x 1,920, support for RAW output format and video-out.