The On Switch

By Murdo Macleod

Techwatch: Robotic dancing in the aisles

Tmsuk, the Japanese robot developer, has unveiled a remote-controlled device that promises a new way to shop from the comfort of your armchair. All you need is a robot and a video-capable mobile phone. To demonstrate the technology's capabilities, a bedridden granny sent her granddaughter out with one of the new robots to buy her a new hat. She manoeuvred it into the shop's millinery department, had a look through the robot's camera eyes at what was available on the shelf, and had her granddaughter model a few before deciding which one to buy.

Techwatch: Mini-laptops make giant strides

Asus, the maker of the Eee mini-laptop, has released the final specifications for its two new and larger Eee PC models. The Eee 1000 has a 10inch screen and a larger keyboard than previous versions, while the Eee 904 has an 8.9in screen. Both have webcams and each a gigabyte of RAM.

The 904 comes with Windows XP, an 80GB hard drive and Wi-Fi, and will cost £269. The 1000 has a choice of Windows XP with an 80GB hard drive (£349) or a Linux version with a 40GB drive (£369).

Techwatch: Never run out of storage

Hard drives are getting bigger, as we store ever more pictures, films and songs on our computers. To cope with all that stuff, one manufacturer, Seagate, has unveiled a 1.5TB (1,500GB) desktop drive and a half-terabyte (500GB) notebook hard drive.

These products, it says, are "The single largest capacity jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives."