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Prolog:
It's an odd thing, desire. Why one man (or woman, let's not discriminate here) should lust after one object, yet that same object leaves another man cold. There's something in my genetic makeup that forces my breathing to go just a little bit faster when I see a ThinkPad, for instance, yet when I tried to convince my fellow PC Pro podcasters to make the glorious X200 our hot hardware of the week - well, short shrift is being too kind.
It didn't win our group test either, and that's partly because it was marked down for design. Now, contrary to all that graffiti in the toilets, I'm no fool: I understand why. Its angular blackness looks distinctly retro when placed next to a sleek new Sony VAIO TZ21, and - sin of sins! - it doesn't include an optical drive, either. But what I desire in a laptop is something that's both a pleasure to use and fast. My loyal, sturdy ThinkPad X60 is beginning to show its age in this last respect.
The X200, on the other hand, is powered by one of the much newer and twice-as-fast Intel P8400 processors, and when we sauntered hand in hand over a weekend's testing - well, it was love at first benchmark. We call this month's group test a Next-gen laptops Labs with reason: the collage of technologies that Intel envelops with the phrase Centrino 2 is genuinely a step up from what existed before.
But I suspect that far more people will gaze adoringly at Apple's latest MacBook Pro<
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There's something about MacBooks that has never sat right with me, perhaps because their minimalist styling indicates that function has been relegated to some far-flung Ryman's league in favour of the all-powerful form. The prime example here is the evaporation of mouse buttons, with Apple instead making the whole trackpad clickable. Clever? Yes. Practical? Not when you're trying to drag and drop.
We've found eBooks similarly divisive. Our resident bibliophile, senior reporter Stuart Turton, churns through so many books each month it's a wonder he has any time to write anything for us at all - I expected him to be a paper loyalist, but the prospect of holding hundreds of books on a device the size of a slim paperback has swept him away. Or perhaps it's because he's looked at Project Gutenberg and figured out he can take his pick from 25,000 free books.
On the other hand, I thought it safe to assume that our news and features editor Barry Collins, a man not immune to the charms of a glistening gadget, would fall head over heels for such a downright sexy device. Not a chance. He's sticking to his print-and-press guns. You can see the full fruit of their lively discussion, and reviews of all the eBook readers it's possible to buy in the UK, in our feature.
Another Big New Technology that leaves some fawning and others cold is digital photo frames, but if you're a doubter get ready to be surprised: a staggering 1.5 million of them were sold in the UK in the past 12 months. And I'm one of the doubters. Now I concede that the Sony S-Frame looks nice, but does anyone really need a dedicated device to display images? After all, you can go to www.photobox.co.uk and get photos delivered to your door the next day. For the £129 inc VAT Sony's asking, I could print out a phenomenal 2,500 photos!
