Slightly over budget and over-specified to fit within last month’s budget projector roundup, the Casio XJ-360 is a very compact and very capable projector that may just be worth those extra dollars.

Hot on the heels of last month’s sub- $2500 projector roundup is HP’s new vp6315.

There’s only so many times I can herald the coming switch from analog TV broadcasts to digital, so I’ll just dig straight into this impressive digital television card.

Alienware are fairly new to Australian shores, but for any PC-addict it's been hard to avoid their familiar little-green-men styling on the internet where Alienware cases are extremely popular among case-modding and PC-styling communities. They're finally here now, and the Area-51m 7700 is the first product through the PC Authority Labs doors.

19in widescreen LCD TV which shows much promise and is Dell’s first consumer offering in Australia. Spec-wise it looks quite good on paper, with 450cd/m2 brightness, 600:1 contrast ratio and 1280 x 768 widescreen resolution, and it doesn’t disappoint when fired up.

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.

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.

The new Sony Ericsson P910i is the only true phone/PDA hybrid on review in this roundup so aesthetically it marries some of the largeness of a PDA with the slimness of a phone to end up with a unit that's just right: it's not too big and not too small.

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.

The XDA (January 2003, page 41) and the XDA II have both done well in PC Authority reviews before, but our main complaint has been one of size: the XDA's are normal PDAs, but big phones. The XDA IIs still keeps a large touchscreen, but the unit is slightly slimmer and thinner than the previous models.

There's one thing that's immediately noticeable and annoying about the otherwise superb Xphone II: it's incredibly slow to turn on and boot up. We clocked about 72 seconds from pressing the power button to connecting to our service, with about a minute of that taken up by just booting the phone's OS.

The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.

The new Nokia Communicator  unfortunately evokes early '90s mobile phones: it has a long body, small display and is not something you could slip into a pocket. Closed, the 9500 is monstrous, but when you open its sideways clamshell design the 9500 comes into its own.

The key differentiator with the PDA2k over other PDAs is the whopping 128MB of RAM in-built for media and files. On top of this there's a separate 64MB ROM for the OS and an SD/MMC slot for further expansion.

Wider than a normal phone and encroaching on PDA girth turf, the BlackBerry 7100v is both a capable phone and a capable PDA.

Belkin is not normally a name you'd associate with leading edge networking products, but in the case of the Pre-N range they've really grabbed the bull by the horns and delivered some excellent gear. The Pre-N networking range is based on the 802.11g standard so it's backward compatible with 11b, but like some other 'turbo' networking gear the Pre-N stuff also offers well over the 802.11g 54Mbps data throughput with 108Mbps.

As well as TV viewing (an analog tuner is built in) this screen's strength comes from its LCD-ness which makes it awesome for plugging into a PC (Media Center, anyone?) or for components like digital set-top boxes or DVD players.

A funky set of  Bluetooth headphones. Connect to a variety of audio sources or use the built in MP3 player.

What makes this torch really cool is that it's batteryless. To charge the thing you need to give it a vigorous shake. Around 30 seconds of shaking powers the torch for two to three minutes.

There's no denying the power of the PlayStation 2 gaming console. Once again it's going to be one of the must-have Christmas items for the home this year.