With Ultrabooks making laptops more slender than ever, it feels somewhat counterproductive to continue lugging a full-sized mouse around if you can’t get on with the touchpad. Logitech claims to have the answer with the incongruously named Cube.

As you’ll see from the photo, it’s not a cube – in fact, when I first saw it on the table at the CES Showstoppers event last night, I thought it was a discarded box of matches.

However, this diminutive little device is a portable mouse cum presentation clicker. The entire upper surface of the device is touch surface. You tap the top of the Cube for a left-click, near the middle for a right-click, and run your finger along the surface to scroll. To move the cursor, you drag the little box of tricks around like a mouse.

It’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker

I’ll stress that I only had chance to spend a couple of minutes with the Cube at the Logitech stand, and this should by no means be considered a definitive judgement, but… I really don’t like it.

The Cube is obviously very light, and that makes it hard to move the cursor with any precision. I’m not the biggest fan of trackpads, mainly due to their lack of accuracy, but I can’t see the Cube being any better in that regard. Having to retrain your muscle memory for left- and right-click could also prove an obstacle. And it’s so small in the hand that it felt as ergonomically-friendly as placing your knuckles in a nut-cracker.

I do like the way that the Cube becomes a presentation clicker when you pick it up: you “click” the Cube to advance to the next slide, and flip it over and click the other side if you want to go back. It’s also unobtrusive: a little USB receiver sits almost flush in one of the laptop’s ports and the battery is rechargable via USB.

Whether that’s enough to justify the $70 (around £45) price tag is, at this stage, highly questionable. But I’ll reserve full judgement until we can literally get our hands on one in the PC Pro Labs.

New Year’s entertainment

We got unfeasibly possessive over a little media player in the Labs, thanks to the fabulous AMOLED screen on Cowon’s S9. It shared so many strengths with the iPod Touch, but with its individually lit pixels – no backlight required – it breathed new life into those iPlayer programmes we’d saved over Christmas. A truly stunning screen and a very nice little device.

On the subject of screens, the oddly named Village Tronic ViBook arrived to extend the life of our old office TFTs. It attaches to the back and converts any display to work over DisplayLink – essentially USB – to run multiple monitors without the need for multiple video outputs. Will 2009 be the year of DisplayLink?

Nvidia continued its strategy of releasing superpowered graphics cards with the mighty GeForce GTX 295. With two chips on one board it’s lighting fast at the latest games, but are there really enough people out there willing to pay £400 for a graphics card?

Reviews editor Jon Bray is adamant that pocket “YouTube video cameras” will storm the market in 2009, and Kodak launched its entry, the Zi6. It didn’t exactly blow us away though, with poor colour accuracy and a bulk that puts it in significantly larger pockets than others we’ve previously been impressed by.

Systems for 2009

If the news of Sony’s not-a-netbook netbook didn’t excite you this week, we had Lenovo’s ThinkPad SL500 and IdeaPad S10e as more usable alternatives. The former is a supremely solid 15.4in small-business laptop with more than enough going for it to earn a Recommended award; the latter is Lenovo’s belated entry into the netbook market – with mixed results.

In the PC realm, Chillblast’s Fusion Gemini continued the manufacturer’s good run of success with gaming PCs, while Logitech’s G13 Advanced Gameboard might make a good companion for those serious enough to spend nearly £50 in the pursuit of gaming excellence.

Christmas business

On the more serious side of the industry, the most interesting arrival was the Imation Pro 7000 64GB, an SSD costing nearly £600 – we reckon it’s only a matter of time before they become the norm in servers, which will pave the way for consumer take-up too. 

Elsewhere we saw the Thecus N4100PRO business NAS device, with support for RAID-6 dual redundant arrays plus mirrored stripes, and the D-Link DNS-34Li3 RAID5 alternative. Servers from NEC and Lenovo completed a busy week.