MacBook Air review (mid 2011)

There comes a time when that giant, corporate-issued laptop stops fitting into your lifestyle. When dragging around a Kensington roller case just won't do. When you start to hear the siren lilt of something thinner, lighter, and maybe a bit more alluring. For years the MacBook Air has been that svelte temptress hollering your name, but it's always been a bit too slow -- all show and no go. It didn't have the power and the longevity to make it a serious contender for your serious affections.

No more. With its latest refresh, Apple has taken what was once a manilla-clad curiosity and turned it into a legitimate machine, not just a sultry looker. Good thing, too, because the death of the plastic-clad MacBook means the Air is now Apple's entry-level portable. Weary traveler looking for a laptop that will lighten your load and, it must be said, your wallet too? This might just be it.

Lenovo's ThinkPad Tablet Sports Optional Pen and Keyboard

Leave it to laptop veteran Lenovo to make a tablet that's as comfortable with a pen or keyboard as it'll be with your fingers. The Android 3.1-based ThinkPad Tablet is a 10.1-inch slab that can work pretty much like most of today's Honeycomb tablets, but also allows you to add a $99 USB-based, full-sized keyboard and a digitizing stylus.

Like the HTC Flyer, the ThinkPad Tablet works with a digitizing pen that, unlike styluses used on traditional capacitive-screen-only tablets, can work on the screen even when your hand is resting on the touch display. It's also pressure-sensitive, which means you can vary the width of your drawing line by decreasing and increasing pressure on the screen, instead of selecting a different pen thickness. Even though there's a built-in slot ready and waiting for it, the pen doesn't ship with the $499 tablet; it adds $30 to the price.

Sony Vaio Z series laptop review

Intel says the ‘ultrabook’ will redefine the future of computing. But if you want a taste of the future today, Sony’s latest Z series is as close as you’re going to get. At 16mm thin, this laptop offers seven hours of battery life and significantly more computing power than even the most hardcore user is typically going to need. It crams a top-of-the-range Intel i7 processor into its tiny body, and can offer up to 512gb of solid-state memory. That means almost instant start-up.

Other features include fingerprint recognition, ultrafast data transfer via ‘Light Peak’ and a special dock that adds a DVD drive and can run up to four monitors from the machine (because you can, rather than because you’d need to). If there are currently rivals to the Z series, then they’re the newly updated MacBook Air, also with an i7 processor, and the Samsung Series 9. The latter is not the super high-performance machine of the Z series, but it does (arguably) look even better than the carbon fibre of Sony. Bearing that in mind, the decision between Air and Z is down to cost and whether you want a Mac or not.