We’ve seen products like Silicon Memory’s ClearLight range of portable hard drives before, yet the ClearLight has some of the most solid yet attractive plastic housing we’ve reviewed.

Dan Chiappini delves into multimedia jargon in our monthly tech term glossary.

Nanotech breakthrough sees quadrupling of capacities.

Travelstar 5K500 due next month.

We test and rate 9 of the best portable presentation devices around.

Battery capacity has proven to be a serious barrier to true mobile computing. Tim Dean looks at how the technology is evolving.

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.

It's a sign of the times when Compaq's Aero 8000 runs Windows CE in a box bigger than a Sharp PC-A250 (reviewed issue 23, p86) running Windows 98. So what's the big idea? Windows CE uses no moving parts, while software in ROM means immediate start-up times, high reliability, and long battery life all highly desirable qualities in a portable.

40 per cent drop in 12 months.

A decent machine with plenty of power, but it’s not earth shattering in terms of features and value.

Two external hard drives in lego-esque cases. One of them is worthy of our recommended stamp.

Blu-ray and HD DVD players will come out fighting this year. We reveal which format is best placed to be DVD’s successor.