Review These days there isn’t much difference between one manufacturer’s graphics card and another’s, mainly because the standard reference designs from ATI and Nvidia work just fine. That leaves card makers scrambling around for differentiators, and with ever increasing concerns about noise, some manufacturers are trying to figure out how to make their cards more quiet than their rivals...

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

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...

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...

Review I’m going to go out on a limb here: the SPV M600 from Orange is the best Windows Mobile smart phone I have ever used. It’s not perfect - that would be an overstatement - but if you’re after a smart phone with PDA functionality, the SPV M600 is the one to get. It’s way ahead of Orange's SPV M500 when it comes to functionality, and the upgrade to Windows Mobile 5 has made a huge improvement too...

Group Test Fingerprint recognition might not be all it's cracked up to be - as it has been proven time and time again that there are ways around it - bit it's still far better than no security at all. As long as it's set up properly, it works well enough, and it's fairly easy to use. Many laptops now come with built-in biometric security, but what about the data that's not on your notebook?

Review Chelsea FC seems hell bent on alienating the entire world, but new sponsor Samsung has gone for a far more inclusive approach with the first 3G and i-mode combination handset, now ready for O2's UK customers.

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

Review It hasn’t been three months since Intel launched the Centrino Duo platform, and you can already find much-better-than-base specification machines for quite a bit less than £1,000. The Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1536 is one such laptop, and it has a very well-rounded feature set and utilises some of the latest technology...

Review When Nvidia launched the GeForce 7800 GTX in June 2005 it broke with tradition by not releasing a mid-range GeForce 7600 and a budget GeForce 7200, which is what we'd expected after the precedent set by the GeForce FX5200/5600/5800 launch and followed by the GeForce 6200/6600/6800 roll-out. Instead, Nvidia demoted the GeForce 6800 chip to the upper mid-range, leaving the GeForce 6600 in the mid-range and the GeForce 6200 as a budget product...

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...

Review It's only been around eight months since Navicore launched its GPS-driven smart phone-based route-planning and navigation application in the UK, but the company has already updated Navicore Personal with the latest maps and a handful of new features, some making it easier to use, others providing more travel information to the driver...

Review The wireless router market is a tough one to crack. There are already many well-established brand names that offer products at very reasonable prices. To compete successfully, you have to either offer something new and innovative, and Asus has tried to do a bit of both. Its WL-530G pocket router is by no means a unique product - it does what every other Ethernet router does - but it's about half the size of most of them...

Exclusive ATI's Radeon X1900 is a darned fine graphics chip but while it has taken the fight to Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GTX in no uncertain terms it also produces plenty of heat. When ATI updated the Radeon X1800 core to produce the X1900 it increased the number of pixel shaders from 16 to 48, and in the process it raised the transistor count from 321m to a phenomenal 380m, with the core covering an area of 352 square millimetres. As a result, an X1900 graphics card draws about 150W from your power supply almost all of which ends up dissipated as heat...

Review With the notebooks taking a huge share of the home market, Sony has been one of the most popular brands, partly due to its stylish designs, but mostly thanks to its well-know brand name. Asus seems to be very keen on taking some of Sony’s share in the home laptop market, and the W2Vc is one in a range of new ultra-stylish notebooks it hopes will do just that...

Review Don't ask me what the word 'skwarim' actually means - I don't know and neither, I suspect, does LaCie. It's pronounced 'square-im', and it's meant to suggest of the hard drive's shape, which is indeed square. Though with its fluorescent pink hue and eyestrain-inviting pattern, this certainly isn't a square product, in the other sense of the word. But has LaCie gone too far to try to make storage funky?

Review The Western Digital Raptor, possibly the most talked about hard drive among the PC performance community, but why would you even consider buying a 36 or 74GB hard drive? Well, most people wouldn't, but with the introduction of the latest Raptor products Western Digital has remedied this problem to a certain degree by upping the drive size to 150GB...

Preview 2006: the year of High Definition video, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Well, that's the way things are looking at the moment, with just about every consumer electronics manufacturer in the world jumping on the bandwagon. These technologies aren't exclusively reserved for the consumer-electronics market - they're coming to the PC as well, and Samsung is the first manufacturer with a PC Blu-ray drive ready to go...

First UK Review Pebbles - you can skim them across waves, 'decorate' the front of your house with them, even make phone calls with them. And now you can play songs on them too. Well, sort of. UK-based digital music player retailer Advanced MP3 Players (AMP) has come across a small, pebble-shaped device and it's chosen to market the South Korea-sourced product under its own name. Given the player's size and shape, what else could AMP call it?

First UK Review It has now been a few days since Nvidia announced its latest range of graphics cards and stocks are already running low at most retailers. In Nvidia's defence, there were cards available to buy from day one, although some online retailers charged a fair amount extra for the cards. The first board to arrive at Reg Hardware's office is MSI's not-so-snazzily named NX7900GT-T2D256E, based on the GeForce 7900 GT GPU...