While most GPS devices require you to pull over -- or at least take your eyes off the road -- to change destination, Magellan’s Maestro 4245 offers the far safer option of voice recognition for route planning. If you need to find a destination such as a restaurant or petrol station in a hurry, you can just bark instructions at the device and it will find your way. It’s also a high-specification navigator with full maps of Western Europe.

The Sony VAIO VGN-TZ31MN/N is an important laptop for Sony – it’s been a big player in the ultra-portable market for some time, but a host of competitors have emerged in the last few months that look set to steal some of its market share.

The Eee PC massively undercut most manufacturers on price and offered unprecedented portability for a budget machine; the Lenovo X300 ThinkPad brought features galore in a tiny package, as long as money was no object; and the Apple MacBook Air offers unrivalled style and a razor-thin chassis. So, the new TZ31MN is Sony’s answer to these pretenders to the ultra-portable throne.

If it seems like the HTC Shift has been around forever without actually being available, that’s because it was – HTC first unveiled this foray into the UMPC market last October, but the device has been coming “real soon now” ever since. A mere five months later, however, and the Shift has finally hit the shelves – has it been worth the wait?

HTC has to be the most prolific smartphone manufacturer on the face of the planet right now. After releasing the Touch, TyTN II, the Touch Dual and the S730 in recent months, you'd think that it would stop for a breather, but far from it. It's just added the Cruise to its ranks of top quality handsets, and O₂ is the first operator in the UK to take it up.

The result is the rather swanky-looking Xda Orbit 2. It's an extensively modified version of the stock HTC Cruise -- but in a good way. The ugly sharp, angular corners have been dumped in favour of a more rounded look, and the controls look a lot more elegant too.

After launching in the US in January, Yahoo has now made the beta version of its Go 3.0 mobile portal application available to European users. Intended as an all-in-one application for everything Yahoo related, the portal has had a full cosmetic makeover to make it much more suitable for small handheld screens. Like Yahoo’s desktop application, Go 3.0 also supports widgets – plug-ins that add new features and services.

Love Windows Mobile’s features but loathe its fiddly user interface? All is not lost. Lots of new smartphones now come with pre-installed program launchers that makeover Microsoft’s mobile operating system to the extent where anyone can make sense of it. If you’re wrestling with an old handset though, how about installing a third-party application that not only masks Windows Mobile with a slicker-looking skin, but makes it much more user-friendly, too?

Very occasionally, a product comes along that makes you wonder why nothing like it has ever been made before. And that’s precisely the feeling we had holding the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 for the first time. It weighs a feather-light 1.45kg, but includes a full-sized keyboard, a 13-inch widescreen and a built-in optical drive. It all seems so simple.

Once you start analysing though, you realise products like this could only appear in 2008. For the first time, technologies like solid-state-disks, low voltage processors and optical drives have reached a point they can be miniaturised – or, in the case of solid-state disks, mass produced – without making unbearable sacrifices.

APC may not be a name you’d normally associate with laptop bags, but the company perhaps best known for its uninterruptible power supplies branched out into mobile accessories some time ago. It now offers a variety of laptop bags in a wide range of styles, of which the TC850N-EC Business Casual Messenger Bag is but one.

Launched in the US late last year, the Palm Centro caught most people by surprise. With its long awaited update to Palm OS not due until 2009, few expected it to see a new smartphone powered by the current creaky Palm OS Garnet, but that’s just what the Centro was – and it’s now available in the UK.

If even the longest-lasting laptop doesn’t meet your needs when you’re working away from the mains, there is a simple solution – buy one or more spare batteries. Simple, maybe, but not necessarily convenient – most laptops batteries are an awkward shape to carry around, you’ll have to use the laptop to recharge them and should you change laptops, you’ll need to change batteries too. That’s where the APC Universal Notebook Battery 70 comes in – it’s an external battery pack that’s not only easy to carry, it works with most laptops, too.