There was a time when Pinnacle dominated the PC video-editing market. But, after its initial success with the DV500, the advent of sophisticated realtime editing seemed to leave the company behind. While it was a good product, the company’s Pro-ONE arrived when competitive products from Matrox and Canopus had been available for some time. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is an entirely different matter.

The annual battle of the small business accounting programs has flared again as both MYOB and Quicken roll-out their 2004 editions. While both have made several tweaks and additions to last year’s models, the main difference this time around is in MYOB’s new product activation model. While many users will consider it overkill, there is little doubt that MYOB and others have suffered as a result of software piracy over the years and this time MYOB is determined to stop it.

Total Home Theatre PC is a company you’d expect to know about these things and you can tell it’s put a great deal of thought in to this system.

As well as being the first company to launch EIDE DVD burners into the mainstream IT marketplace, Pioneer is the company behind DVD-R and DVD-RW recordable media formats. In the last couple of years, it has fought hard to stave off competition from Philips' rival standard, DVD+RW, and until recently buying a DVD recorder meant locking yourself into one standard over the other.

Stacks of potential, but current hardware is underwhelming and the client software a mess.

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.

It might seem unfair comparing MYOB’s best selling single user product with Quicken’s multi-user small business accounting package, but the key difference between the two is number of licences and not the functionality.

This system looks every bit as good as it sounds, which means it's a stylish, effective package

Rechargeable battery breakthrough good for your wallet and the environment.

A quantum leap in usability over the previous version, although malware protection could still be better

It looks like a standard webcam, but the Axis 205 is cleverer than that. Its internal web server and 10/100 Ethernet port mean it can be directly connected to and accessed by anyone on the network.

For a company whose only other major release was the original Half Life, Valve has pushed the boundaries with fresh, bold gameplay that stays true to the legendary legacy.

It’s expensive, but Baddog’s Lanbox comes with personality and outstanding support.

The 650 really picks up where the 600 left off, and while it doesn't look too different to the eye, many of the changes are under the hood or subtle manipulations of the 600's design. It runs the new Palm OS 5.4 and has a much faster 312MHz Intel PXA270 processor, but the most immediate difference is the screen: it's now double the resolution at 320 x 320.

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.

A fierce protector when it comes to web threats, but merely middling elsewhere

TI's current workstation-class 3D graphics accelerators - dubbed X1 - are the company's latest effort to keep a hand in the high-end 3D graphics market. Consumer-level 3D hardware is now massively powerful, of course, but for all-out 3D performance and rock-solid driver integration you need a card dedicated to the purpose, and ATI claims the X1-128 is it.

The Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 is the latest sound card from Creative Labs, the company that has dominated the consumer-level computer audio card market for most of the last decade.

For a laser printer manufacturer, GCC has an unusual history. Formed in 1981, the company originally developed enhancements for coin-operated video games such as Ataris Missile Command and also brought us PacMan.

VideoLogic is a name few people would now instantly associate with graphics accelerators. In fact, its parent company, Imagination Technologies, was present at the birth of the PC 3D accelerator field in June 1996 with its PowerVR card.