At the more budget end of the scale we saw HP’s Compaq CQ2000, a beautifully designed small-form-factor PC with a 20in TFT for a mouth-watering price of just £286 exc VAT. We’ve seen cheap mini-PCs and nettops before, but this is the first we’d really want in our living room.

We also reviewed Toshiba’s latest business model, the Tecra R110-112, which came in bright white with a vast array of security features and reasonable power too.

Upping the resolution

Dell resurrected the 23in TFT, a size we thought had been well and truly killed off by the rising popularity of 22in and 24in rivals. The reason? The SP2309W sports a unique 2,048 x 1,152 “higher then Full HD” resolution which we found both liberating and a little bit baffling.

Not to be outdone, Creative launched its Vado HD, an upgrade to the pocket video camera we liked so much last year. Unfortunately Creative also saw fit to up the price, which puts it beyond what we’d consider reasonable for these low-budget consumer devices.

Making sweet music

Two music production suites reached the labs: Steinberg’s Cubase music suite reached version 5, and brought with it a swathe of inspired new features; while Cakewalk Sonar 8 Producer had the competition running scared with its wealth of features and plug-ins.

And finally, the Linksys Media Hub NMH405 was by far the most simple and intuitive NAS device we’ve ever used, not to mention stylish and well designed too. Unfortunately someone forgot to put the go-faster stripes on the side, as its read and write performance let it down quite badly.