Compaq Aero 8000

It weighs under 3lbs, has a 800x600 res backlit 256 colour screen, a 95% full keyboard and competes with the Sony Viao range for size. It has Pocket Office (Word, Powerpoint, Access, Excel)and more, plus a built in sound recorder, speaker and media player. It has a built in 56K modem. It comes with 16meg of memory that you can configure to either expand processing speed or storage capacity, and it has expansion slots everywhere for adding flash cards and more memory. It switches on instantly and has a battery life of around 7 hours (optional battery pack can increase this to 12). The closest thing to it on the market is the new Psion 7, but that costs around £700. ...

Although this is classified here as a PDA, it might be considered a baby laptop. The difference is that it has no disc drives, and the operating system (Windows CE) and applications are all in ROM. This is both good and bad, or to put it another way, there's no such thing as a free lunch. If, like me, you get fed up with waiting for Windows to boot and programs to load, you'll love the fact that both operations are virtually instant. You shut down by closing the lid, and boot up the same way. Windows CE includes 'pocket' versions of Word and Excel, and this one comes with Access and Powerpoint as well. In fact, you can run a Powerpoint slideshow directly ...