The scoop: Zire 72 from palmOne, about $300.

What it does: One of two new PDAs from palmOne (the other is the low-end Zire 31), the Zire 72 is an upgrade of last year's Zire 71, one of the first Palm PDAs to include a digital camera. This year's model includes a 1.3-megapixel camera built into the back. PalmOne's tag line for the device is "For work. For play. For life." The work part means typical PDA functions including a personal organizer, Office integration for Word and Excel documents, and a Bluetooth wireless connection. The play part means features like the digital camera, video capture and an MP3 player. The Zire 72 includes 32M bytes of memory (with 24M bytes available for the user), and runs off the new ARM-based 312-MHz Intel PXA270 processor.

Why it's cool: We're big fans of reducing the number of devices to carry around, so a PDA that includes a digital camera and a good MP3 player (songs and videos run off a Secure Digital I/O card, sold separately) is always appreciated. The digital camera has improved slightly since the Zire 71 days, but the images are still only Web- and e-mail-worthy. Still, for those times when you don't have a digital camera (but you do have a PDA), having the camera can help catch spontaneous moments, and the 1.3-megapixel camera is better than the current slate of camera phones.

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The scoop: Zire 72 from palmOne, about $300.

What it does: One of two new PDAs from palmOne (the other is the low-end Zire 31), the Zire 72 is an upgrade of last year's Zire 71, one of the first Palm PDAs to include a digital camera. This year's model includes a 1.3-megapixel camera built into the back. PalmOne's tag line for the device is "For work. For play. For life." The work part means typical PDA functions including a personal organizer, Office integration for Word and Excel documents, and a Bluetooth wireless connection. The play part means features like the digital camera, video capture and an MP3 player. The Zire 72 includes 32M bytes of memory (with 24M bytes available for the user), and runs off the new ARM-based 312-MHz Intel PXA270 processor.

Why it's cool: We're big fans of reducing the number of devices to carry around, so a PDA that includes a digital camera and a good MP3 player (songs and videos run off a Secure Digital I/O card, sold separately) is always appreciated. The digital camera has improved slightly since the Zire 71 days, but the images are still only Web- and e-mail-worthy. Still, for those times when you don't have a digital camera (but you do have a PDA), having the camera can help catch spontaneous moments, and the 1.3-megapixel camera is better than the current slate of camera phones.

The score:    

The scoop: Vaio desktop (PCV-RS530G), from Sony, about $1,300.

What it does: A desktop system that includes some very nice multimedia options, including a TV tuner and personal video-recording application. When you connect a cable TV line to the computer, these applications let you record shows or let you watch TV directly on the computer.

This can save space in a limited area (such as a college dorm room), or in an office where you don't want to place a separate TV or monitor. The additional DVD burning and video editing applications let you convert your saved recordings onto DVDs. With a number of USB 2.0 and i.Link (IEEE 1394) ports, you also can attach a number of different peripherals, making it a complete multimedia system. The system comes with a 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 processor, at least 512M bytes of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card to keep up with all the video and multimedia projects you can think of.

Why it's cool: Sure, you can get a Media Center PC, but the systems we've tried haven't impressed us much. The Vaio desktop system pretty much does everything else that a Media Center PC does, but with Windows XP. We love being able to watch TV and compute at the same time, so the addition of the TV tuner card was a definite plus.

The Giga Pocket Personal Video Recorder pretty much acts like a TiVo or ReplayTV box, with a free electronic program guide available through the Internet. It was easy to save TV shows onto the hard disk, edit out the commercials and save to a DVD. It let us create DVDs of our favorite TV shows without having to wait a few years for the eventual commercial DVD to come out.

The score:

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