It turns out that Microsoft [I]is[/I] bringing out Windows XP Media Center Edition in Australia, but until such time as it materialises -- and Microsoft Australia is being very sketchy on the dates -- those of us looking to integrate our PC media files with our televisions and hi-fi systems have to turn to bridging solutions.

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.

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.

We've traversed the acronym laden landscape of VoIP for you, and present you with the PC Authority guide to VoIP: what it is, what kinds of services you can find, what savings you can expect to make and how it is that you can go about setting up VoIP for yourself at home.

Part 2 of our VoIP products and services roundup includes: MailVoice, LetsChat, Netgear TA612V, Netcomm V40 and Octtel gateway.

Another low-cost screen, Vibrant's VL5A9PL 15in model had a number of setbacks.

Similar in nature to the Zinwell ProV (June 2002, page 46) but with better execution, the X-Media DreamBox is a small set-top box for your desktop that lets you watch TV, video, console games and DVDs on your monitor without the need to power on your PC.

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

There are always moments in life when you wish you had your camera to hand. The Labs team rounds up the latest pocket cameras.

Will home media centres do to the entertainment industry what video did to the radio star? With new technology reshaping our lounges, homes could soon become fully functional media hubs.

Voice recognition is the holy grail of computing: the ability to walk around your room and dictate to your PC is an attractive one, however the real experience with voice recognition is far different.

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 slimline HP Photosmart R607 follows on from the R707 in that it shares many of that camera's fine features and styling, including its plastic/magnesium-alloy casing.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

The HP PhotoSmart 850 has a huge protruding lens, and a fairly fast-responding display and a clever feature that turns off either the viewfinder or the LCD if not required (depending on which one you're using at the time).

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.

From the non-functional, just-because-you-can pile, comes this four-way electric shock reaction test game from JayCar Electronics.

Implementing an in-car MP3 player can often mean an expensive overhaul to your audio system, or at the least buying a fiddly, cable-strewn cassette adaptor for an existing MP3 player like an iPod. This assumes that you do have an MP3 player already though.

The Athlon64 has only been out a short while, and although it's an excellent processor, from all accounts it's not selling as well as it should be.