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Your support makes all the difference.Hauppauge WinTV USB; Pace Digital TV Adaptor; Sharp Zaurus SL-5500; Fuji FinePix F601 Zoom
Hauppauge WinTV USB
£49.99
www.hauppauge.co.uk
With the World Cup just days away, the chances are that you're trying to work out how you can keep your eye on the ball while your boss keeps his eye on you. Well, Hauppauge may have the solution. Its WinTV USB is a tiny box that can be carried to the office and plugged into a PC, turning the screen into a television. Plug one end into a TV aerial, and the other into a USB socket on your PC or notebook and away you go. You can watch television in a resizable window, so that you can have your Excel spreadsheets open and the footie in one corner of your screen. What's more, you can even snap and print stills from whatever you're watching.
Pace Digital TV Adaptor
£99.99
Pace Micro Technology 0870 120 1910
www.pacefreetoview.co.uk
Want more TV channels but don't want to pay Murdoch or the cable companies? The Digital TV Adapter provides the cheapest and simplest method for you to convert your existing analogue television to digital, and get all the "free to air" digital programmes, without subscription fees. If you do decide you want to watch subscription channels at a later date, this upgrades to pay TV. It's also easy to install, as long as your television has a Scart socket, and you have the right postcode and a decent aerial– which are the important things to consider before buying.
Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
£499
Sharp 0800 138 8879
www.sharp.co.uk
The Zaurus looks fantastic, the pull-out keyboard is a plus, and the hardware puts it on even ground with the best Pocket PCs – a 206MHz Intel StrongArm processor, 64MB of RAM, replaceable lithium-ion battery and a 240 x 320 pixel colour screen. There is also both CompactFlash and SD memory card slots. So far, so very good. But it's not powered by Palm or PocketPC; underneath, the software is Linux. That isn't noticeable, though: I found the Zaurus easy to navigate and was soon tapping my way around its applications – which include an address book, calendar, e-mail program, image viewer, and media player that supports both MP3s and MPEG-1 files. My only disappointments were the somewhat chunky proportions and the price.
Fuji FinePix F601 Zoom
£599
Fuji
www.fujifilm.co.uk
Another digital camera, but this one is rather nice. Despite its compact proportions, it has more features than you can shake a Hasselblad at – 3.1 megapixels (or 6.1 with some fancy footwork), manual photographic control, movie capabilities of up to 66 seconds on its 16 Megabyte memory card and 33 minutes of audio. What's more, it has a super fast shutter speed so, unlike many other digital cameras, you can capture the exact moment. It's also extremely easy to use.
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