Labs

Like 602PC suite, this only costs 20 quid, and you get plenty for it: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, a note-taking program, an organiser, a mail client, a presentation program and some other bits and bobs besides.

At first we got excited by the program that lets you edit PDFs, a notoriously tricky proposition. Unfortunately it didn't

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recognise the fonts in many of our documents, and didn't seem to want to let us edit text anyway, which made it a dubious 'editor'.

The word processor was a mixed bag, too. The format painter works, but only on entire paragraphs, which is a bit too indiscriminate. Creating a table of contents was easy, but for some reason 'Heading 1' was omitted from the styles listed by default. On the upside, the very good spellchecker detects errors as you type, and there's a good selective word count.

The spreadsheet handled basic and advanced maths and formulae fine, but wouldn't allow us to assign keystroke shortcuts to the macros we created. When we told it to sort alphabetically, our data ended up in the wrong order, which is a bit of a boo-boo. The mail client worked fine, synchronising with both POP3 and IMAP accounts, and the database was generally a good Access clone, though not as precise as Microsoft's somewhat pricier product.