Notebooks are one of the last bastions of innovative industrial design, and so it's refreshing to see some new ideas. The Todaytech M120W, even though it's based on an OEM housing, is playing its part in this area with its glossy royal blue top, and the silver surrounds on the palm rest and screen.

It's a fairly light unit, but even though it's only made of plastic it is still fairly sturdy. The display is a 12.1in widescreen, which makes the whole system a little smaller than other units. This should usually contribute to increased battery life, but in this case the lack of power is an issue. The Todaytech's 2400mAH battery means it has half the capacity of the other units in this test, and this is reflected in its poor showing in the relatively light reader benchmark where it only attained 145 minutes. This is not a laptop for extended road use. If heavy portability is required, we'd recommend an extra battery on standby.

The fairly powerful 1.8GHz Centrino should help matters in general use but as our PCMark result shows the Todaytech is let down by the 256MB of RAM and integrated graphics capability, where came second last in the pack.

On a positive side, it does have an integrated webcam, a scroll pad, and a DVD-RW. But the asking price of $2399 prices it out of the competition when we look at the Dell and Targa, which offer a lot more for a lot less.