Lab

Christmas gadgets: Games

It's always a little weird working in magazines. We have to write about Christmas in advance, so while everyone else is easing into the annual chaos that is the festive season, we at PC Pro have already been there, done that, roasted the editorial turkey and eaten it with all the trimmings.

But our early Christmas toil this year is your gain. We've gathered together more than 40 products from across the technology spectrum - from simple £15 flash drives to top-of-the-range, ultra-desirable video-capable digital media players - to provide you with the ultimate hi-tech gift guide.

If you have a tech-loving friend, family member or someone you're just desperate to do well by this festive season, this is the Labs for you. But rest assured that, while the reviews may be short and sweet, every product has undergone the level of testing you'd expect of the PC Pro Labs team.

We carefully assessed the digital cameras for image quality and ease of use with the rigour we normally reserve for business laptops and PCs. We examined the internet radios for sound quality and used them in real-world scenarios, including listening to them in the kitchen and putting them on shelves and in corners to see how they performed.

We examined the sound quality in detail and investigated the image quality of all our portable media players. And the hard disks and flash drives were put through the sort of torture test we usually reserve for internal desktop and laptop hard drives.

Whatever your budget, whatever you're looking for, you'll find something to tickle your gift-buying fancy here. If you don't, we'll eat our collective Christmas party hats on top of that early turkey.