HP’s latest PC blends power, useful business features and a keen eye for detail

With consumer PCs these days being as fast as the supercomputers of yesteryear, are dedicated workstations still relevant?

Just a couple of years ago, the PC speech recognition and dictation market saw four key players jostling for position, but today the contest is just between IBM and one other player, Dragon.

Voice recognition is the holy grail of computing: the ability to walk around your room and dictate to your PC is an attractive one, however the real experience with voice recognition is far different.

Getting your PC to meaningfully accept voice commands or dictation has been a benchmark for futuristic computing since time immemorial. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS for short) has been a leader in the field for some time now, and is rapidly becoming devoid of competition.

This notebook was designed from the ground up with business and security in mind, and it succeeds.

A worthy update to the most underrated of the Office applications — OneNote is now a must-have.

A rock-solid and fully kitted-out laptop for the demanding worker.

Well built and with astonishing battery life to boot. It’s pricey but decent value.

A killer system in the sub-$1500 sweet spot.

Sydney Trains is a great little program. As the name implies, this is a time-tabling application for the Sydney metropolitan train network. Written for PDAs, Sydney Trains works on both Palm OS and Pocket PC.

A versatile and compact tablet PC with stunning battery life, but we do have a few usability complaints.

Attractively small and aggressively priced, the Ultra Slim is an interesting proposition for businesses

A remarkably tough machine that will endure almost anything thrown at it, although this comes at a price.

It has been over two years since we previewed Office XP, but Microsoft has finally given us a glimpse of Office 2003. The finished version should be on the shelves by the end of July, but will it be worth the upgrade? The answer could be an emphatic 'yes' if you're a Tablet PC user, as Microsoft has just launched OneNote (see page 59), making full use of electronic ink. The company is also introducing InfoPath (see page 59) for designing electronic forms, with the flexibility of XML. The classic apps have also had their seen refurbishment, with Outlook (page 56) getting the most attention, and FrontPage and Publisher (page 58) a bit of a revamp.

Excellent value for so many features, though BitDefender Small Office Security could be easier to use

Optical character recognition (OCR) software has been around for a long time and OmniPage from ScanSoft is often touted as the market leader in this space.

A rough, tough laptop with serious attitude, but its keyboard proves an Achilles heel.

A complex but powerful tool that’s made simpler by its new Dashboard interface

OneNote is one of those rare apps you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. It's basically a note-taking application where you work on sheets of electronic paper, putting down your ideas and rearranging them.