Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

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.

Although similar products have been available (with much controversy) in the US for a few years, the Samsung DVD-H40A is the first Personal Video Recorder (PVR) to reach our sunny shores.

The iZak is at first glance nothing more than a transparent plastic portable hard drive. It has all of the hallmarks - small form factor, a single power LED at the front and a few nondescript ports at the rear.

The JoyBook 8000 marks the first attempt by BenQ to enter what some might argue is a crowded notebook market. BenQ's stance on the JoyBook is different from other notebook manufacturers though, as it won't be selling the JoyBook as 'just another notebook', but will instead market it totally as a digital lifestyle product.

The TViX is a fairly small box, roughly about the same size as a good DVD box-set, but inside it's got some amazing smarts. This also technically isn't a media streamer as such - it's more a media cacher thanks to the 80GB hard drive inside.

The Excel G736 notebook from Protac is a desktop replacement, and as well as better-than-normal notebook specifications it also comes with the other traditional trapping of a desktop replacement notebook: it's big, it's chunky, and it's heavy.

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.

For those with deep pockets and big hearts, this DVD recorder comes with full PVR functionality and an 80GB hard drive.

Dell's OptiPlex range is aimed at the corporate market, and traditionally bog-standard and boring boxes with little imagination and componentry to match, but the OptiPlex SX260 is a totally different beast.

It’s an odd gambit business-wise: align your own brand with that of another. But for Acer, the one-off team-up with Ferrari to brand and produce the Acer Ferrari 3000 notebook has resulted in a stunning product.

Looking quite a lot like what I imagined the son of Apple's Titanium and Powerbook lines of notebooks would turn out, the AStone notebook features both the Titanium's solid matte silver magnesium-alloy body with the Powerbook's white limned styling. From the very outset this makes the AStone one visually appealing notebook.

It's a fair guess that if you're a frequent burner of optical media that you have more than a few scratched or dirty discs that can no longer be read by your drive.

The Nomad Jukebox Zen is Creative-s go at aping the Apple iPod (November 2002, page 40), an MP3 player built around a notebook hard drive, and has done a remarkable job of it.

This tiny notebook, measuring a mere 26.5 x 22 x 2.1cm looks quite ordinary on the outside, yet comes with quite an interesting processor inside. The Valeo CP10 is not powered by Intel or AMD, nor even Transmeta, but instead has one of the first VIA Antaur CPUs we've come across.

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.

This is not the first 'desknote' that we've reviewed (see Protac DeskNote, June 2002, page 37) but in our estimation the Aspire 1703SC is the first system that truly expounds the virtues of true desknote-ism.

We see a lot of notebooks at PC Authority, but like the BenQ JoyBook 8000 (page 37), the Portege 2010 was an immediate crowd pleaser when it was removed from it's shipping materials, garnering lots of "oohs" and "aahs" from techies and non-techies alike.

ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

This rather small Centrino-powered notebook from Fujitsu has been designed for students and the hip-crowd; those that want something that's capable of work and entertainment, is not too large or heavy to carry, and that can easily balance on a café table between text books and a hot latte.