A new take on an old classic, with a first-person perspective and mixed results.

Not quite the games wizard.

Not just a roadie-killing piece of innovation, but a stunning guitar too.

Two of the oldest standards in the book join forces to try and spell the end of long, expensive VGA cable extensions.

Certainly not a speed merchant, but it delivers plenty of backup facilities, good security and unique design concepts.

After enjoying the Satellite 2800 (reviewed issue 42, p80) so much, the Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 is a disappointment. This is surprising in that the general belief would be that the more powerful machine would be more appealing to the technically inclined than the Celeron-based Satellite 2800.

An excellent phone for businesses and consumers, although some will find the lack of 3G a concern

Smart, clever and capable. A couple of imperfections keep it off the top spot, and we might be tempted by the camera-less S70, but it's a fine choice

A new interface delivers significant improvements, but the bundling of separate apps for related tasks raises concerns.

Ideal for a bedroom or kitchen, but it lacks the quality for streaming a music library.

Dare we say the near-perfect strategy game? A royal treat for history addicts.

When Intel announced the production of 90nm products over a year ago, the most obvious change was the move to double the existing 512KB L2 cache to a full 1MB of on die memory. This simple transition added more performance than some of the minor clockspeed increases to date, and made the Prescott a household name.

One day Microsoft might realise that forcing its customers to have a Bill Gates issued 'passport' to use services on the internet sticks in people's gullets like a jagged fishbone. In the case of Microsoft Money you need a passport if you want to take advantage of its online banking services, but once you do sign up you find that it is the one area of an otherwise excellent program that does not work properly.

Toshiba's PDA strategy is clear: business users should opt for the larger, more flexible e750 (above), while consumers are catered for by the e350. After all, this has all the features most people need in a sleek package that won't break the bank.

FreeHand has had a long, distinguished career since its launch 15 years ago, but time has caught up with it. While Macromedia concentrated development on its Web-oriented MX applications, FreeHand was put on the back burner and fell seriously behind its main rivals CorelDRAW (see issue 60, p54) and Adobe Illustrator (see issue 51, p88). So, is this latest release evidence of further decline, or has FreeHand finally risen to the challenge?

Voice recognition software has always been considered to be a rather curious product...

Some powerful improvements – but you won’t get the most out of this unless it’s used alongside other Adobe apps.

Accurate speech recognition, a flexible control system and a good price – for those in need, Dragon delivers.

We take mail filtering for granted today, but it was big news back in 1991. Pegasus was the first to do it and, 12 years later, its long history ensures lots of development time and a strong community of helpful users. The latest release is a major upgrade, and filtering is still at the forefront.

Plenty of modern phones support email, of course, but what always made BlackBerry special was its push technology. With this, you don't need to dial up to collect your email: just sit back and wait for the messages to come to you. Wherever you are, if an urgent email comes through to any of your email addresses -- and the 7100v supports up to 10 -- you can act on it instantly.