Microsoft's hardware division pumps out some excellent keyboards and mice, and from the latest refresh of their range comes the evocatively named top-model Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth.

It turns out that Microsoft [I]is[/I] bringing out Windows XP Media Center Edition in Australia, but until such time as it materialises -- and Microsoft Australia is being very sketchy on the dates -- those of us looking to integrate our PC media files with our televisions and hi-fi systems have to turn to bridging solutions.

Adobe has been riding high on the success of the portable document format (PDF), and the Acrobat creation tools needed to generate them. Later in the year version 6.0 will be launched, but in the meantime we have a preview of Acrobat Professional 6.0 Beta.

The myS-7 from Sagem is the company's first foray into the smartphone market with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. It's a little larger than the Xphone II but this marginally wider neck means that keys are just that tiny bit wider, and when your main mode of input is the keypad this tiny extra can work wonders.

Last month we reviewed Microsoft's Bluetooth-enabled keyboard and mouse (January 2002, page 52), and at $399 we deemed it more worthy as a Bluetooth starter kit than a wireless keyboard and mouse kit.

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.

This is the second Smartphone we've reviewed (O2's Xphone, March 2004, page 55) but, unlike the Xphone, the Motorola MPx200 features a clamshell design. Smallish, black and sleek, the MPx200 is a Tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 phone with GPRS which enables email, SMS, MMS and WAP capabilities.

Will home media centres do to the entertainment industry what video did to the radio star? With new technology reshaping our lounges, homes could soon become fully functional media hubs.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.

Acer’s tiny new Tablet PC, the TravelMate C111 marries the functionality of their previous convertible tablet with the low-power high-performance functionality of the Intel Centrino.

After January's shenanigans with this system, it's nice to have it back in the testing Labs. My initial impressions haven't changed: this is one mean system that will handle anything you throw at it, and the benchmarks back that claim.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

You’ll see a lot of hype surrounding the 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and doubtless you’ll see benchmark scores for the new processor. If you do, regard them with a heavy degree of skepticism because all is not rosy with this chip.