Review Skype may have given all the microphones built into desktop and notebook computers over the years a role in life, but making calls still feels more comfortable with a phone in your hand. Yes, if you don't fancy shouting at your computer, you can use a headset, but only if you don't mind feeling like you work in a call centre...

A second report has come out of Taiwan claiming Asus has won the contract to manufacture Apple's upcoming Intel-based iBook, expected to ship as the MacBook.

JVC will this month ship its latest Flash-based digital music players, offer consumers in the US a choice of five female- and fella-friendly colours, and sporting neck lanyards with integrated earphone cables.

While Asus is pondering whether to produce a Lamborghini-branded phone, Nokia beaten it to the finish line with a Aston Martin version of its Nokia 8800 handset. Like the cars, it's not cheap - Aston Martin wants a whopping £940 ($1,640/€1,353) for the device.

T-Mobile's Robbie Williams-branded Sony Ericsson W300 Walkman phone will ship across Europe in time for the 9 June start of the European leg of the crooner's Close Encounters tour, the cellco said today.

Asus has finally revealed what lies under the hood of its Lamborghini-branded notebook, the VX1. Unfortunately, the laptop is unlikely to impress anyone expecting the computing equivalent of the performance cars it's named after. It's also more expensive than Asus has hinted in the past.

Do AMD and Intel have something to tell us? Is their cutthroat rivalry a sham? Are they really in business together? If online retailer Ebuyer.com's website is anything to go by, the two chip makers must be in cahoots.

Japan's Buffalo has become the latest storage product provider to offer M-Systems' 16MB FlashDisc, an apparently "exciting" new take on the old USB Flash disk concept that packages the solid-state storage into a circular shell reminiscent of 1970s computer tapes.

TDK this week confirmed its plan to develop a Blu-ray Disc with a storage capacity of 200GB. If successful, the company's R&D effort will yield a disc with four times the capacity of today's biggest BDs and double the size of protoype next-generation BD-Rs TDK has already demo'd.

Apple's upcoming Intel-based iBooks - now firmly believed to ship under the MacBook brand - may see the company once again offer the product in a range of coloured cases not seen now four more than four years.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has slapped PC World for advertising product on TV that it was unable to supply to customers because of lack of stocks.

The UK retail chain, part of DSG International, has been told not to show the ad on TV again. This is the second time this year the ASA has chastised PC World on the same issue.

Intel's as-yet-unannounced Celeron M 4xx series - the first budget-priced processors derived from the chip maker's 'Yonah' core - have gone on sale in Japan, according to local news sources.

Review In October 1996, the Ricoh GR series of 35mm film cameras was born. They were some of the company's first compact cameras aimed at the enthusiast and pro snapper where image quality and the resolving power of the lens were the paramount considerations, and not just a tiny package. A digital GR that aims to follow those illustrious forbears in terms of image quality, usability and sheer panache has its work cut out...

Samsung has shown off a mobile phone that's little bigger than a credit card. The ultra-slim handset - dubbed the Platinum Cardphone but more labelled with the more prosaic model number SCH-V870 - measures just 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9cm and weighs 81g.

Sonos will this month cut the price of its multi-room digital music system. Its latest ZonePlayer wireless playback device, the ZP80, provides the same core functionality as Sonos' ZP100. However, to get the price - and the size - down, Sonos has stripped out the integrated amplifier used to drive speakers directly from the ZonePlayer.

ATI is preparing to release a cut-down version of its Radeon X1900 XT and XTX GPUs, reducing the chip's pixel shader complement from 48 to 36 and knocking back its clock speed. The part will ship as the Radeon X1900 GT, it has been claimed.

ATI has formally renamed its Radeon Xpress 200 chipset to CrossFire Xpress 1600, the company's website reveals. Such a move had been anticipated - a number of motherboard makers have already begun cutting and pasting the new name into existing product documentation.

Review Round-up This week's no-holds-barred product assessments from around the web...

Review It's generally a waste of a lot of money to go for a top-of-the-range card from any manufacturer. Unless you really, really need that extra little bit of performance, it makes more financial sense to go for the next card down. This is especially the case with ATI's X1900 XT and X1900 XTX - the XTX's performance advantage over the XT simply isn't enough to justify its higher price...

Suddenly, all sorts of small companies are crawling out into the sunlight to tout alternative optical media technologies that will support HD content without the need to move from the current red-laser technology to tomorrow's blue-wavelength lasers.