In the world of pure-slate tablet PCs, the Motion M1400 has long been the model to beat. Enter the new Motion LE1600, which builds upon its older sibling with a faster processor, more RAM and double the L2 cache -- all in a lighter package. The LE1600's carbon-fibre chassis is as corporate as a grey flannel suit, but its sleek design and the powerful performance within make for an attractive system. If you're sold on slate-style tablets and can stomach paying around £1,500 for a portable computer without a keyboard, this is the machine for you.
Out in Iraq, they use laptops that are different from ours. In a skirmish towards the beginning of the war, a US soldier got caught in gunfire with nothing to defend himself but a Panasonic Toughbook 72. BusinessWeek reported that this soldier held his Toughbook over his chest and seconds later it caught a bullet which ended up lodged in the hard drive, ruining his Minesweeper high scores, but saving his life.
There's nothing wrong with the mainstream Toshiba Tecra A5 laptop. It offers a fairly light though largely nondescript case, lots of unremarkable components, such as a Celeron M processor and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, average performance and battery life, and a decent price of £660. Unfortunately, none of these mundane attributes makes the Tecra A5 just so perfect you have to have it. For an especially cheap business-oriented portable, find an identically configured Dell Latitude D510; for a more expensive and full-featured package, go with the ThinkPad R52.
When you buy a £500 laptop, you can't expect perfection, but increasingly, you can get a pretty decent machine. A case in point: the Acer TravelMate 2355LCi. This inexpensive mainstream laptop delivers ample performance, a big screen and a comfortable keyboard and touch pad. Of course, it has some considerable drawbacks, particularly its extrashort battery life. But if you're content to stay close to a plug, the Acer TravelMate 2355LCi is hard to beat.
The Dell XPS Gen 2 heralds a new era for gaming and desktop-replacement laptops. Taking advantage of Intel's latest-generation Centrino technology (code-named Sonoma) -- specifically, a top-of-the-line 2.13GHz Pentium M 770 processor -- and Nvidia's new premium graphics card, the GeForce 6800 Go Ultra, Dell has packed a monster gaming powerhouse into a relatively slim and lightweight laptop. Apparently, gamers need suffer the indignities of humongous, hot and heavy Pentium 4 laptops no more.