Super Talent isn’t of course a newcomer in the world of computer technologies. Its name is bound with successful DDR memory modules production in the first place and now they are going for another sort of fame – a fame of stylish gadget manufacturer. “The Godfather” USB flash is only a stylish product as there is nothing new the design of the drive, but there is something to be delighted with. The license agreement with Paramount allows Super Talent to put “The Godfather” logos on the body of the flash and preinstall notorious quotes form the movie and original posters and that’s about it. Shipping starts this December, available memory capacities vary from 1 GB to 8GB.

First of all mind you that the latest N96 v12.043 firmware is not up to bring too many of new features. As we started with Nokia was not perfect with its flagman N96 model, now is a good time to fix it along with many other Nokia devices which get their firmware updates regularly. That is exactly the way it should be and it doesn’t mean that Nokia puts up for sale underfulfilled gadgets. In the meanwhile, the updated devices show a bit more of what was expected, not only patches for obvious bloopers. More concrete on N96 with v12.043, it now has: camera performance update. It shows in less motion blur and color bloom effect. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have enhanced interoperability. Messaging fix doesn’t alter SMS text into MMS if case when the SMS was sent to more than 20 numbers. With an additional download, compatibility with Nokia Email service is available. And, except for fixing crushing applications, many more changes in screen settings, themes and ringtones, etc.

Overall firmware v12.043 made N96 faster and more reliable with plus 45 free MB RAM after boot. The updating pack has 120 MB at Nokia official web site, or over-the-air it would be only 3 MB.

You’ve probably already gone through the news scoop and you know the sweet details - face detection, smart contrast, both a xenon flash and a photo flash, as well as geotagging complete the camera feature set. A 2.4-inch QVGA TFT display with scratch-resistant mineral glass cover will serve you as a viewfinder.

The Sony Ericsson C905 seems like an excellent high-end cameraphone - our old trustworthy 8 megapixel Canon EOS-1D Mark II N is already starting to feel a wee bit threatened. Will it keep its job?

The Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-shot also comes with a built-in accelerometer for screen auto rotation, TV-out port, GPS and, wait for it - Wi-Fi support. Yes, that’s true wireless networking on a regular feature phone.

And did we also mention the quad-band GSM/EDGE connectivity, the UMTS and HSDPA support, stereo Bluetooth (that’s A2DP for the nerd group), USB and FM radio with RDS? Well, it is a nice feature combo by all standards. And it so happens, that we managed to sneak it for a quick hands-on.

Truth be told, the Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-shot has obviously never heard of diets and healthy food. With a thickness of 18mm (up to 19.5 in its thickest part), it’s a seriously fat fella - at least by feature phone standards. There are other really popular smartphones that take the thickness problem even further, but the C905 Cyber-shot is not a smartphone.

Now that being said, some of you are probably going to so hate us for saying this but- the C905 actually looks nice. Some high-quality materials have been used for creating its overweight body and it’s crafted flawlessly. We knew we like it as soon as we laid our eyes on it for the first time.

But see what it’s worth, a first look is never enough. Hit this small bump on the way to getting to know the Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-shot a little bit better.

You can buy the Elite in the US for $480, and it will be released in the UK on 24 August with an ‘estimated’ retail price £300. You can find our review of the original Xbox 360 here.

The hardware
Except for its black finish and HDMI port, the Xbox 360 Elite is cosmetically identical to the Xbox 360 Premium. The 360 is neither as slick as the glossy PS3 nor as cute as the diminutive Nintendo Wii, but the Elite’s matte-black finish is certainly a big step up from the ‘iPod white’ colour scheme of the earlier Xbox 360s. While the Elite blends in with the other black components in your AV rack, however, it may not match all your accessories — you may need to mix and match some white 360 accessories, as not all accoutrements will immediately be available in black.

The back panel of the 360 Elite includes an HDMI port, an AV connector, a single USB port and an Ethernet jack.

Whereas the previous Xbox 360 could output high-definition video up to 1080p resolution via VGA, far more TVs actually accept that highest quality picture via the HDMI input — if they can show it at all. Most HD Ready TVs will only show 1080i or 720p, but you can select those as output options on the 360, or your TV will downscale 1080p to fit. The downside is Microsoft seems to have opted for something less than the HDMI version 1.3 found on the PlayStation 3. That means that any movies played on the optional HD DVD add-on will be limited to standard Dolby Digital soundtracks, not the higher-resolution Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD, or DTS-HD Master Audio.

Whereas the Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 game consoles have built-in Wi-Fi support, the older Xbox 360 was limited to a wired network connection. Sadly, that hasn’t changed on the Xbox 360 Elite — Ethernet remains the only built-in option. Yes, you can get the optional wireless networking adaptor, which conveniently clips on to the back of the 360 — but it monopolises the solitary USB port on the console’s back and costs an extra £60.

The Xbox 360 Elite’s hard drive is located in the detachable module that snaps on to the side of the console. Since the 20GB hard disk on the original Xbox 360 filled up very quickly — download a game demo here, a movie trailer there, and a few extra game levels or multiplayer maps, and soon you’ve got no space left at all. The real benefit of all this extra memory will be felt when the UK and European version of Xbox Live Marketplace gets downloadable TV shows and movies like its US equivalent, though. For now, it’s just breathing space.

The wireless controllers are identical to previous models except for the black colour scheme. There’s no new functionality, such as the tilt sensitivity in the PS3 or the motion control of the Wiimote. They accept two AA batteries, or you can opt for a snap-on rechargeable model (available separately).

Two other less-than-brilliant aspects of the Xbox 360 that have been carried over to the Elite are the absolutely massive external power supply (top left in the pic above) and the console’s noise. While the giant power brick can be hidden away behind your TV cabinet, the exhaust fan and especially the DVD drive remain noisy to the point of distraction.

Well, you’ve found one. The Hitachi UT42-XV700 lacks a TV tuner and the reason is simple: it’s been removed to save space. Because this TV is just 38mm thick, there isn’t room for ‘extras’ — or as some might argue, ‘essentials’. So, with no tuner, this TV is more of a screen than a TV, designed to work with an external source.

At the launch event, Hitachi told us the UT42 will be available in June or July, priced around £2,400.

Design
Quite simply, the Hitachi UT42 — the ‘UT’ standing for ‘ultra-thin’, of course — really is quite a remarkable sight, when viewed in profile, especially. From the front, it sports a bog-standard, shiny black bezel and no real disruptions to the sleek facia. There’s a small and unobtrusive speaker on the front, which is hardly even noticeable. On the right hand side of the screen, sitting on the bottom of the bezel, is a power switch and that’s your lot.

At the back, there is similar level of sparseness: you get just two inputs in the form of a single HDMI and a lone VGA port with an accompanying audio input. Apart from a power socket, that really is it.

The remote control reflects this lack of inputs and built-in features. It’s a simple little thing with just 19 buttons — four of those are the directional controls for the menu.

Features
At this point, we start to run into some problems. It’s not so much the TV, but with what to say about it. Because it’s such a simple device, there isn’t a great deal to mention. The LCD panel is a 100Hz, 1080p (24p compatible) using IPS-alpha technology to improve viewing angles and with a new backlight diffuser to improve the distribution of light across the screen.

If you want to watch Freeview on this TV, you’ll need an external decoder; it will also need to be one with HDMI out on it. In the future, Hitachi will sell a media box that will feature a built-in tuner and a host of connections for hooking up other equipment. Of course, if you have a Freeview PVR with HDMI out, then you could simply buy an HDMI splitter box to connect all your HD gear.

A lack of component is likely to annoy Xbox 360 owners who didn’t buy an Elite, but there is always the option to buy an AV receiver or the Hitachi media system to go along with the TV.

Setting up the TV is dead simple, as you might imagine. There is no tuning to be done, so all you really need to worry about is the picture settings, balancing the brightness and other controls, which didn’t take us very long at all.

The 901 is, in many ways, so much better than its peers it’s laughable, but if you have an Eee PC 900 don’t worry about upgrading. The basic body shape and size is identical, save for a few millimetres here and there in the 900’s favour. The screen, too, is the bright 1024×600 panel that we know and love.

The same but different
Both notebooks also use the same Linux Xandros operating system and have a 20GB solid-state hard drive (an XP model will have 12GB storage). And while the Intel Atom processor that pulses away under the diminutive keyboard of the 901 is superior to that of the 900, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

There was some confusion about the 900’s battery: at the time of launch, Asus UK believed that it would ship with a 5800mAh battery. Many arrived with a 4400mAh affair, which fizzled out after just two hours.

Better battery
Such was the outcry that Asus is planning to offer Eee 900 owners a bigger battery for just £10. The lesson has been learnt. The 901 comes with an enormous 6600mAh battery – even with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switched on it lasts for well over five hours.

Be careful what you wish for, though. That cell adds an extra tenth to the weight of the Eee, and gives it the kind of rounded rear end Queen sang of. You do get Bluetooth built in, although the Linux stack did struggle to recognise our Windows Mobile phone as a modem.

Mouse matter
Some may complain that the tiny Eee keyboard hasn’t been stretched. We disagree. Most of the time when you’re browsing, you aren’t using the keyboard. Leaving extra space for the large multi-touch mouse pad is a wise decision.

Compare surfing the net on this to the HP Mini-Note or the Acer One with their tiny trackpads, and it’s like they’re actively trying to stop you having fun.

Speaking of the net, you get 20GB of secure online storage that you can drag and drop to within the standard file explorer, essentially doubling your available disk space. That’s the kind of detail that you don’t see from other UMPCs.

And yet, while the differences between the Eee 901 and the Acer Aspire One are often laughable, £120 is not a trivial amount of money. Bearing in mind that with the latter you’ll also need a spare battery, Bluetooth dongle, storage card and possibly even a carry bag, things are a bit closer. But hang on for a couple of weeks and you should be able to find the 901 for about £40 less, at which point your mini laptop conundrum will be a no brainer.

Now presenting a range of sizes and features.
With the Satellite Pro laptop computer series, fundamental doesn’t mean limited. They come in different display sizes to meet your mobility needs 13.3″, 14.1″, 15.4″ or even a full 17.0″. They offer a choice of dual-core processors (AMD® or Intel®), graphics components, or other convenient functions such as the USB Sleep-and-Charge port (available on select models) which allows you to charge your electronic devices via any of the three ports, and more whichever of these options suits your business situation and working style best.

A welcome touch of simplicity.
Take your eye off the ball in business and you might not get another chance. So you’ll find the Satellite Pro notebook PCs pleasantly streamlined, offering fundamental performance and connectivity, free of unwanted features that distract you from the task at hand.

Value too affordable to ignore.
What does value mean to you? If it’s a machine amply equipped and keenly priced with the components you need to help you accomplish the day’s agenda, then the Satellite Pro notebook PC might be best working definition of value and affordability.

Sporting a pseudo touch interface, the Moto ROKR E8 offers a flash, overly large design for its music dedicated offering.

Part of the ROKR series, which in the past has offered iTunes connectivity, the new handset comes with both the mini USB for the headset and a dedicated 3.5mm jack, so you can use your own headphones, however, you have to use the supplied headset if you want to use the radio.

The candybar design is reminiscent of the old SLVR L6, but is something new from Motorola, where design has obviously taken some thought. That said, it is a rather large offering, and strangely top-heavy in the hand.

Get past the flat design and you surprisingly unveil the most user friendly Motorola device we’ve seen at Pocket-lint in years.

The main reason for this change is ModeShift, a system that changes the keys according to what you are doing. Turn the handset on and you are presented with a 12 key number pad with the usual 0-9 keys plus a few extras, however press the camera or music button and the 0-9 options disappears and dedicated buttons appear. For music you get the usual forward, backwards, pause, play options, while for the camera it’s all about zoom.

Motorola have also stepped away from the Symbian OS for this model, instead using their own Chameleon operating system.

But a pseudo touch interface isn’t the be all and end all as the device also promises to replace your iPod with its almost circular scroll interface.

In an attempt to ape the iPod, the almost complete scroll wheel (see images) will allow you to scroll through track listings with ease. Holding your finger at the end of the semi-circle will in fact continue scrolling, while anything else will stop the movement mid-flow.

In practice, the small screen combined with the sensitive scroll wheel mean it is easy to miss the song you are looking for and takes some time to get used to.

Get past the scroll and semi-touch interface - there are actual buttons with haptic feedback - and the handset is Motorola doing what it normally does, i.e., disappoint.

The memory for songs is a meagre 2GB, although you can add more storage via the microSD slot. This slot, unfortunately, is hidden under the back cover. While the camera matches the industry standard with 2 megapixels there is no 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity instead with Motorola relying on large, and top-heavy design to carry it through.

The result? You are left with something the size of a smartphone in your pocket without the power to match.

Small, compact and silver the My Passport Studio is a simple affair. Geared specifically for the Mac market, the unit comes HFS+ Journal formatted for Mac OS 10.4.11 users and above although it can be reformatted for PC use.

Dimensions are 8 x 126.74 x 81mm and it weighs an incredibly light 180 grams. Keeping it small, there is no power brick, with power instead being drawn from either the FireWire or USB 2.0 connection.

There are no buttons on the device itself and the only notification you get that it’s on is one of four status lights at the rear of the unit.

Depending on how much data you’ve got on the hard drive will determine how many lights are lit and one represents 0-24%, 2 light are 25-49% and so on. It’s a quick and simple way of showing you how much data you’ve got on board, but in reality you’ll hardly use it.

Connecting to a Mac is as simple as plugging in a USB or FireWire cable and both are included in the box saving you the hassle of buying them.

The My Passport Studio comes in three sizes 160GB, 250GB and 320GB and the largest drive promises to store up to 91,400 digital photos or 80,000 songs (MP3), or 24 hours of Digital Video (DV), or 140 hours of DVD quality video or up to 38 hours of HD video.

Western Digital includes WD Drive manager and documentation on the drive itself although the only benefit you’ll get from installing this software is the ability to check the amount of hard drive space used via the top toolbar and those status lights on the drive itself.

Transfer speeds are to be expected, with a promise of 400Mbps for FireWire 400 users and 480Mbps for USB 2.0 users.

Taking the popular form factor of a handheld vertical unit with flip-out screen, the Camileo Pro HD comes in where the Camileo Pro left off and we’ve found that because of the names, there is a great deal of confusion about which camera you are talking about.

It is lightweight and almost pocketable. We say almost, because it will slip into a jacket pocket, measuring 70 x 110 x 33mm and weighing in at 180g, it is not as smallest option out there.

From a design point of view it is not the most advanced looking device, it is fairly conservative in fact - pushing toward the price point has obviously meant simplification in design and materials. There is also no lens cover, but you do get a case supplied in the box.

The screen is a 2.5in TFT LCD that flips out and will rotate on its axis so you can see yourself whilst filming yourself, if you are into that sort of thing. Whilst the screen quality looks ok, the info icons applied to it are basic and clunky, but can be turned off. Likewise, the menus are basic in their appearance but functional enough and easy to navigate.

Control buttons lie on the back, with a control stick, mode and menu buttons, still image capture, zoom control and record. There are three additional buttons lying on the edge of the screen, which basically control playback and are somewhat superfluous to requirements as their features could have been incorporated elsewhere.

The control stick is handy allowing you to select white balance, flash settings, macro mode, as well as set the on-board illuminator. More on these later.

From a memory perspective, you only get 128MB on-board, which is of very little use, so at the point of purchase you need to be looking at getting an SD card. SDHC is supported, so get the biggest card you can afford. An indicator of the fact that you aren’t really intended to use the internal memory is that you don’t appear to be able to access it when an SD card is inserted - including in playback mode (although you can access both areas once connected to a PC).

Video shooting options at the highest settings give you 1280 x 720p (a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio), with options to step down to DVD, VGA, or a web resolution. Video is shot in MPEG4. Whilst 720p isn’t the full HD the device name might infer, it is reasonable quality for playback on your TV without taking up too much storage space and does mean it is easier to work with than the 1080p big brother.

And so to the all important video quality. Outdoors the camera works well, especially on near and middle distance subjects, but we found that at a distance things dropped off rapidly, with loss of definition and colour. Colours are pretty good on the whole, the brighter end towards the reds can be a little vivid, but not that you’d complain.

We tested the Camileo Pro at a street fair, which presented a range of challenges: fast moving rides, lots of noise, lots of people, flashing lights. Again, the Camileo performed well, dealing with the flashing lights and coping fairly well with the rides. It does sometimes suffer with focusing and the focus can motor back and forth trying to fix on the subject. There is no manual focus option, so you can’t avoid that unfortunately.

The Camileo does tend to be noisy on the audio front, with little protection from wind or background noise, and no option for an ancillary mic. In our tests at the street fair, the audio is at times verging on overwhelming, but again it depends on what you want to film.

The 3x optical is very slow, sometimes you’ll wonder if it is working, so it is best to line up on your subject before you start recording and not expect too much from the zoom. There is also a remote in the box that covers a range of functions, but we found it was a little hit and miss and sometimes didn’t seem to work.

Enter a low light environment and the Camileo Pro HD begins to struggle. In a normal room in daylight, images are very cold, even when well lit with natural light. The on-board illuminator, in the form of two front-mounted LEDs, can be set to auto, and you’ll find it on almost all the time you are indoors, although you can opt for it to be on, or off, at all times, but not changed whilst filming. This limits your range indoors - close work is no problem, but looking down a corridor is really gloomy.

In terms of connections there is an AV out which also doubles as the headphone socket. Under a small flap is the USB for connection to your PC and for charging, as well as the HD out, which is a standard 3.5mm jack. In the box you are supplied an AV cable and the Component cable - for the best quality playback you’ll have to use the two in tandem, taking your video from the HD socket and your audio from the AV, in lieu of an HDMI socket.

As to the still camera options, the Camileo Pro HD has a 5MP CMOS sensor, giving you 8 megapixel images after interpolation/resampling. These are surprisingly good in fact, so you don’t have to miss out on an opportune snap here and there because you left your camera behind, but again, it isn’t a replacement for your digital compact. Interestingly there is also a dedicated flash - it doesn’t rely on the LEDs from the illuminator.

In the box you’ll also find bundled Roxio 8 Essentials software which you can use to create DVDs and so on. When connected to a PC, it is easy to transfer files across, but equally, you could just whip out the SD card and put it into a card reader. You can also set up the Camileo as a webcam and so on once connected and there is a standard tripod mount on the bottom should you need it. You can also opt for audio only recording if you want to use the Camileo as a voice recorder.