This rather small Centrino-powered notebook from Fujitsu has been designed for students and the hip-crowd; those that want something that's capable of work and entertainment, is not too large or heavy to carry, and that can easily balance on a café table between text books and a hot latte.

Apple and style are synonymous and the rounded lines and gloss white plastic chassis add to its durability and looks. Its slot-mounting combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW means there are no moving parts to break off in accidents, and serve to provide additional storage space should the comparatively small 30GB hard disk not be enough room for your files.

While large formed notebooks are great for the users with a static location, ultra portables are still the easiest and best way of conducting business for students, business people and the road warriors.

The big test for any interactive encyclopaedia is how well it deals with local information. Microsoft quickly learned that Australian students are not interested in an American view of the world and for the past few editions of its Encarta it has been putting a lot of effort into the Australian content.

Another scanner to share the same software as the LiDE 20, Canon's 3000F boasts a jumbo sized Z-hinge for scanning of books and large bound documents helping to evenly light image scanning – great for students and perfect in conjunction with the quality results gained from the included OCR scanning software.

The PDA covered so heavily in this months PC Authority has always had a reputation as a primarily functional tool that students and executives use to organise their lives. With this in mind it is interesting to have a look at a product that brings out the lighter, fun side of the PDA.

For such a high specification machine with a large display, we didn’t have high expectations of battery life. We were wrong. Not only is this one of the best looking and functional notebooks we’ve played with in some time, but this notebook managed to stay operating at full load with a looping productivity test for well over three and a half hours – enough for students, road warriors and home users.

While the build quality of the ASUS A4000L is good and sturdy, this notebook is much larger than the others featured in our roundup.

Dubbed the 'Facebook phone', this small and stylish social-networking phone will connect to you to your favourite net apps including MySpace and MSN.

Despite various attempts at Windows Desktop alternatives, Linux is still best suited to servers, for which Red Hat is by far the most popular choice. With this in mind, it came as no surprise when in May 2002 Red Hat split its product line in two: Linux and Enterprise Linux.

Stylish and packed with features, it is not the cheapest 12 inch notebook available. This said, if you simply must have the features on offer inside this 'book, then this notebook does it all with style.

It wasn't too long ago that mono-lasers by themselves cost over $500, but now that colour lasers have dropped in price, mono-lasers, too, have shuffled down a peg. Samsung has delivered a laser printer with a decent scanner for a very low price. It's a SOHO device, but without some of the features associated with that, such as faxing and document feeders.  

Dell's reputation at providing reasonably priced capable 'books shines through in the 510M - the cheapest notebook on test this month.

When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

Another notebook to embrace the entertainment market and sell units with widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio displays, this PowerNote packs some serious hardware under the hood, pushing not only AMD's Mobile Athlon 64 3200+ processor, but also ATI's Mobility RADEON 9700 a 60GB, 7200rpm hard disk drive and a multiformat 4-speed DVD burner for disc creation on the go.

An above average overall finisher, the Targa's claim to fame is undoubtedly its long battery run times, achieving the best part of 5 hours on a single charge whilst juggling a full productivity workload of Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

The Ultimate Reference Suite is the latest digital edition of the Britannica. Consisting of three encyclopaedias, numerous dictionaries, thesauri, timelines and even an atlas, it's just as exhaustive as its predecessors, covering mountains of topics in impressive detail.

Cheap to buy, cheap to run and bundled with features; print quality holds it back from greatness.

This pre-production notebook was shipped to us in a professional looking silver lockable briefcase. We were expecting to see top secret government papers rather than a slimline ultra low voltage (ULV) notebook.