A great keyboard, wonderful screen and loads of features, but battery life is weak and it’s a touch pricey

Excellent touches promise so much, including a great screen and browser, but in use it’s unbearably slow

Powered by an Intel Pentium-M 1.6GHz, the Modtech Civic Diamond 1600W Centrino notebook has a decent core specification, including a useful 512MB DDR RAM, 40GB of disk space and an ATI Mobility RADEON 9000 card offering 64MB of non-shared memory.

Diamond FireGL1

Mitsubishi monitors have always been a popular choice in the marketplace, and the Labs, and not without merit.

The Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Digital DVDXRW1248-069 was the clear winner out of all of the DVD burners we tested in this roundup. It had the performance, the features, and the value for money to easily stand out.

The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

While the price of LCD screens drop to comparable pricing levels with CRTs and sales are on the rise, technologically they are held back because at the end of the day the picture delivered by an LCD limits its application compared to a CRT.

Slim, sleek, powerful and good value, but poor battery life rules this phone out of the running

Well made, lots of goodies and an improved interface make this the best touch-only phone from HTC so far.

The difference between 'plus' and 'minus' DVD writers comes down to features. Despite some headway being made by the companies pushing DVD-RW, DVD+RW is still a more flexible format for those interested in creating movies and storing data.

What do you need from a cordless keyboard? Basically, no cord, and keys that work. Things like smooth action, well-spaced keys, special-function Internet controls and a weighty feel that stops it sliding around are all pluses.

Mitsubishi Diamond View DV 159

Mitsubishi's DV181 is almost identical to the BenQ FP882 we reviewed in last month's Labs (December 2002, page 76).

A powerful phone with a superb keyboard, but it’s simply too costly to win an award

There is something totally decadent about playing your favourite PC game on a 30-inch LCD monitor with stereo sound from two banks of speakers - one on each side.

This is the first display in a fresh new line of TFT monitors to come from Mitsubishi this year, and from this early glimpse things are looking good. The unit we received was a very early pre-production model -- it had missing panels, the occasional loose wire and a completely different colour scheme (the TFT pictured is the final shipping version), but as a look to where Mitsubishi is headed it was perfect for our needs.

One of the very best multichannel speaker systems around. If you’ve the space and cash, it has to be heard

One of the very best multichannel speaker systems around. If you’ve the space and cash, it has to be heard