News In Brief
Stylish notebooks and a multitalented digital camera make their debut. Plus: a spam filter fact.
Product Pipeline
Office at Last: Microsoft's Office 2003, which we previewed in the October issue, goes on sale October 21. Preinstalled versions of the productivity suite will be on some new PCs by the time you read this.
PC Cleanup: Executive Software has updated Diskeeper 8. The disk-defragmentation utility now monitors hard-disk reliability and estimates performance gains of defragging. Pricing starts at $50 for the Professional Edition and $250 for the Server Standard Edition.
Picture This: Why buy four different digital devices when one can meet all of your needs? Panasonic's SV-AS10 D-Snap multimedia digital camera features 2-megapixel resolution, along with a QuickTime video recorder, a digital audio player, and a digital voice recorder. Yet the $300 device can still fit in your pocket, as it measures just over 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and one-third of an inch thick.
No Glasses Needed: Sharp's latest notebook enters a new dimension--the third dimension. The Sharp
Actius RD3D, which is scheduled to ship in the United States in the middle of October, features an LCD that can show images in 3D without your having to use special glasses. The notebook also offers a 2.8-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of memory, and a 60GB hard drive; it is expected to retail for $3299.
Tidbyte
Spam filters used by major Internet service providers may be overly aggressive, a study finds. Seventeen percent of messages--almost one in five--that a recipient wants are blocked by the nation's top 12 ISPs, Denver e-marketing firm Return Path reveals.
