Bond girls get groovy gadget

Equality at last! In the latest Bond film, which premieres in the UK this week, it's the girls who have the groovy gadgets.

In The World Is Not Enough Denise Richards, who plays Dr Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist, relies on her trusty Microsoft Windows CE-based HP Jornada handheld PC to diagnose a bomb.

In a race to defuse an international power struggle, with the world's oil supply hanging in the balance, Dr Jones, along with Bond, uses the Jornada to diagnose a bomb while travelling at 70mph.

"We now have one hundred per cent penetration of the weapon debugging device market," quipped Jonathan Roberts, general manager of the productivity appliance division at Microsoft.

The Jornada 430se was announced in September. It weighs 8.8 ounces, has a built-in MP3 player, 133MHz Hitachi processor, 16Mb memory, colour screen and Microsoft Outlook 2000.