Laptops are dime a dozen at PC Pro at the moment, with the Labs full to bursting with everything from practically identical netbooks to the gargantuan HP Pavilion HDX9320.

So when the Novatech X50 MV arrived we were, admittedly, a little non-plussed. Another 15in laptop? Really?

However, a closer look reveals that there’s plenty about the X50 MV that is a little different to the usual notebooks that arrive in the Labs on an almost daily basis. It’s fully Centrino 2, for instance, thanks to an Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 processor. It’s a mid-range part when compared to other Centrino 2 components but, with a clock speed of 2.53GHz and a 6MB L2 cache, there’s no doubting the power available here.

Intel’s new WiFi link, the 5100 part, ensures connections to newer draft-n networks can be easily handled, and a new mobile GPU, the GeForce 9600M GT, could provide some gaming potential too. In fact, it’s hard to find an old component in the X50 MV at all. That’s not the most interesting thing about the X50 MV, though.

That honour is reserved for a small screen that’s built into the back of the lid and runs Windows Sideshow. There’s a handful of useful applications already installed – an RSS feed viewer, Calendar, Windows Media Player compatibility and Solitaire. There’s also a host of options for linking up with Outlook 2007, allowing you to check your email and contacts without turning the PC on. And that’s before you’ve raided the Windows SideShow website to download more applications.

We’re hopeful that the addition of SideShow to this potentially powerful laptop is a genuinely useful feature and not spurious eye-candy, and the number of applications now available to download should make sure of that.

We’ll have a full review up soon but, in the mean time, what are your favourite uses of SideShow – and what’s your opinion of it in general?