Slim, good-looking and affordable – and you can even work outside in sunlight. Just note the niggles.

Toshiba won this month's cat walk competition.

A rock-solid and fully kitted-out laptop for the demanding worker.

Toshiba’s R100 redefined what it meant to be an ultra-portable laptop.

The Toshiba Satellite P30 is a 17-inch behemoth with a price tag to match.

Widescreen is still one of the flavours of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

The Portege A200 also has many of the necessary features we would expect in an education notebook, including LAN and modem ports, two USB ports, a DVD-ROM, and 802.11b/g with an wireless on/off switch.

The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.

Widescreen notebooks are the way of the future, really they are. With entertainment now proficiently done on the go, why would we go back to limited 4:3 aspect ratio? It's far easier to work on two spreadsheets concurrently in widescreen without needing to alt tab like a madman. Toshiba, like many manufacturers, has seen this need and provided such a product.

Toshiba don't often venture into lower price point notebooks, so we were quite impressed to receive a system from them under $2500, let alone a desktop Pentium 4 3GHz processor, DVD burner and 64MB ATI RADEON 9000 IGP graphics.

When we ran four tablet PCs in December 2002 (Issue 61, page 36) we got plenty of response from readers looking to find out more about them. Over a year on now and tablets have increased dramatically in spec and design although pricing hasn’t reduced as much as we’d expected - possibly since they still haven’t made mass market appeal and sales.

We see a lot of notebooks at PC Authority, but like the BenQ JoyBook 8000 (page 37), the Portege 2010 was an immediate crowd pleaser when it was removed from it's shipping materials, garnering lots of "oohs" and "aahs" from techies and non-techies alike.

Not a bad notebook, the Satellite 1110 marks Toshiba's first foray into the sub-$2,500 notebook market, and it's a welcome one. By its own merits, the Satellite 1110's specifications are reasonable: 1.5GHz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 16MB RADEON Mobility, 20GB HD and DVD-ROM, but in comparison to the field it was average in all regards.

As far as Tablet PCs go, the only indication that the Portege 3500 is one, and not a notebook, is the solid stainless steel and magnesium hinge centered under the display. This is the single point for rotating and flipping the screen over and down, and it locks into place with a satisfying 'snick'. It's a much better work-around than the hinge and locks used by the Acer TravelMate C100.

Make no mistake, this is one heavyweight of a notebook. The 3.3kg of the Satellite 2800 accounts for some of this, but otherwise it applies to some of the exceptional features found on this model.

The Portege 3110CT is one of the latest in Toshiba's line of notebooks and continues the tradition of portability established with the first in its line.