Bold design, with a big sound, but one that doesn't really thrill

Not the best value, but this desktop NAS appliance offers good backup and webserver facilities.

3Coms AirConnect is one of the high-speed wireless LAN (WLAN) contenders, combining three PC Card network interface cards and a base station. The AirConnect cards dont inspire confidence, as the aerial assembly isnt securely fixed to the card body. 3Com looks to have remedied this with the release of the new XJACK cards (estimated at $400 each). These cards have a pop-up antenna and are less prone to breaking off the card.

Pull the plug on the party, but keep the music playing.

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.

WinFM is a neat little package dedicated to Internet radio, although that term is a little abstract, because theres no radio waves involved.

It doesn’t do anything apart from simple music streaming, but the price and ease of use make this a good choice for getting music from one room to another wirelessly.

Quick, packed with interfaces, but just a little too expensive.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

This rather optimistic time assumes no use of the backlight, but we found half-brightness to offer the best compromise – and even at this setting, the V35's screen impresses.

Dell has waited several years to release its own PDA, and now committed to Pocket PC, Dell's main weapon is aggressive pricing that's on the verge of insane.

While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes.

Good things often come in small packages and that's the case with Sony's PC108E. It is only fractionally larger than the JVC GR-DX77 (the smallest camera in the lab) but weighs in 65 grams lighter. Sony has kept it compact by providing a separate docking station that contains the USB, DV and S-Video ports. There also are AV and additional microphone connectors on the camera itself.

Polaroid's move into the digital market was just commonsense. After all, the digital camera market in Australia is growing faster than any other non-food consumer item except DVD software, and the days of traditional cameras seem well and truly over.

If there was a PDA king, this would be it. HP includes everything in the iPAQ H5550 including 802.11b, Bluetooth and fingerprint recognition. Most importantly, this is the first PDA we've seen to run Pocket PC 2003

The Zire 71 isn't a business tool. It's not even a straight forward personal organiser. Palm is targeting the ears of Sony's CLIÉ range, the new PDA boasts not only a headphone jack for MP3 player use, but also a 640 x 480 camera. The camera is ingeniously hidden behind the metal backplate. To activate, you simply slide down the backplate to reveal the lens, the screen becoming a viewfinder. You can save photos to the memory – 12.7MB before you start loading programs – or to an SD/MMC card that slips into the top-mounted slot.

The first of seven planned DVDs in the series, 'Planet Earth: Oceania' is a beautiful disc. It's a DVD comprised of highresolution images of the Earth's coastlines, beaches, oceans and islands taken from space by the Space Shuttle and MIR Space Station...

The battle for position in the palm-sized PC market is set to explode in the coming year, and Compaq is determined to lead

A great ultraportable, but stiff competition just keeps it from the A-List.

Frequent long distance callers could save a fortune with this.