• Integrated scroll wheel works really well
• Includes wrist rest
• Ball can be juggled around for inspiration

• Wrist rest may over-extend fingers
• Scroll wheel feels a little loose
• Still tethered by a cable

Design

The Orbit Trackball’s a little smaller in dimension than most trackballs, including Kensington's own Slimblade Trackball. You'll still need a fair amount of desk space put aside for it, but unlike a regular mouse you won't need to move it at all, giving it somewhat fixed dimensions.

We say "somewhat fixed dimensions" because Kensington supplies a soft rubber wrist rest with the Orbit Trackball. It doesn't so much affix to the base of the Orbit as pretty much just sit there plopped onto the base, but again, as a trackball this isn't a particular problem as all the moving parts are contained around the bright blue trackball itself.

The design of the Orbit ball makes it stand out from the trackball crowd, which traditionally goes for a bright red design that usually ends up giving off a distinct Hal 9000 vibe. The electric blue tinge of the Orbit ball has more of a low-budget fan-made Star Trek film feel to it, if that's your sort of thing.

Features

The Orbit Trackball uses a single red optical sensor to detect the movements of the blue sphere itself, flanked by two standard mouse buttons. Unlike the Slimblade, there's no additional buttons on offer here, although you can define an action for both mouse buttons pressed simultaneously. Those who don't like messy cables may be annoyed by the fact that the Orbit is tethered by a USB cable.

What makes the Orbit Trackball stand-out is what Kensington has stuck around the trackball itself: a scroll wheel. This is something that trackballs have struggled with for some time; while it's feasible to set up scroll wheel-style action to a dedicated button, it requires generally more finger dexterity than most users have or wish to utilise. By ringing the entire ball with a scroll wheel, it's always easily reached by hand. Or, in this case, fingertips.

One interesting omission that Kensington makes with the Orbit's packaging is the lack of software. Kensington's dedicated Trackball drivers, dubbed TrackballWorks (Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Mac OS) are available via download only, which could be annoying if you wanted the extra features on a system that lack Internet access.

Performance

For some users, a trackball represents the only real option due to physical mobility issues. Others may like a trackball simply because they represent a fixed way to perform basic mousing tasks. Whatever your take, in most respects the Orbit is just a regular trackball with regular features.

One thing that's arguably not a feature, but well worth mentioning to non-trackball users is that the blue trackball pops out easily, and if you're stuck for inspiration it's great to juggle from hand to hand in order to catch your muse. Just don't throw it at anyone. It's very solid.

In testing, we found the wrist rest comfortable despite the fact that it added considerable size to the overall unit, and quickly worked out a comfortable position for our hand to sit in so that both buttons were accessible with thumb and pinky finger. While the scroll wheel runs the whole way around the trackball base, we found the ring finger to be the most comfortable way to access it.

A trackball's still not for everyone. There are areas where a trackball can be harder to use than a regular mouse. Gaming's the most obvious case-point, depending on the style of games you like to play.

Conclusion

Trackballs remain a niche product, partly due to the different set of mousing skills they supply, partly due to the price premium that most trackballs command and partly due to the lack of feature parity with even the cheapest mice. The Kensington Orbit Trackball with Scroll Ring does a great job of covering the scroll wheel problem while being sold at a very affordable price point. The funky design is an extra plus. It's still a niche product that won't appeal to everyone, but if you're a regular trackball user, or figure one could aid your productivity or lessen your wrist pain, the Orbit Trackball is highly recommended.

• Kensington SlimBlade Trackball
• Lexus Remote Touch
• Lexus RX350 Sports Luxury (2009)
• Tigers Electronics Giada N10

• Excellent speed throughput, especially for small files
• Backwards compatible with USB 2.0
• No moving parts
• Very portable

• Supplied USB cable is very short
• SSDs still command a serious price premium
• No included software

Design

When we first clapped eyes on the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0, we mistook it for a business card holder. We've certainly seen sillier things adorned with company logos, but this is no mere device for storing professional details in an archaic way. Measuring in at 73.49x118.6x12mm, it's quite small and will easily slip into a pocket or bag. There's a single activity indicator light and a micro B male-type USB socket at the back of the drive. It feels solid in the hand and well-built, unlike many external drives that sport a distinctly cheap plastic feel. Then again, at the price point the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 commands, "cheap" isn't a word that'll be used around it all that much. Aside from the drive, the only other accessory included with the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 is a standard USB 3.0 micro B to A-type cable for connecting the drive to a compatible PC.

Features

Underneath the funky aluminium casing of the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 lies an SSD (solid-state drive; if that's got you scratching your head, this article should clear things up: Five reasons SSDs are great). The Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 is sold in three sizes: 64GB (AU$249), 128GB (AU$389) and 256GB (AU$819). We were supplied with the entry-level 64GB model for testing. The 3.0 in its name betrays its other key selling point: it's USB 3.0 compatible, and will even let you know if it's plugged into a USB 3.0 port or a USB 2.0 port by the colour in which the drive lights up. If it's lit up in blue, you're connected at full USB 3.0 speed; if it's green, you're toddling along with USB 2.0.

Kingston's product page for the HyperX Max 3.0 states that it offers read speeds of up to 195MBps and write speeds of up to 160MBps. Naturally enough, that's with USB 3.0; don't expect these kinds of speeds if you're plugging it into a USB 2.0 port. The short USB 3.0 cable is a minor annoyance, as most of the systems (including our test rig) with USB 3.0 will be desktops with an additional USB 3.0 card at the rear of the drive rather than front-mounted ports, making the drive itself a little tricky to plug in.

One thing you won't get with the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 is any additional software for backup duties. Some folks will see this as a blessing, but we'd rather have it, and format it away, than be left without - especially at this price point.

Performance

In order to get the most out of the HyperX Max 3.0, you'll need a system with USB 3.0 capabilities, either by adding a card to a desktop machine or by utilising one of the relatively few notebook systems that come with USB 3.0 pre-installed. For the purposes of this review, we used a Gigabyte GA-USB 3.0 card, which was supplied to us by Kingston for testing the HyperX Max 3.0 drive.

First testing of the read speed with synthetic benchmark HDTach revealed an average read speed of 109.4MBps. That's well below Kingston's stated 195MBps rate, but it's qualified with the magical "up to" statement. In any case, that's quite quick, at least at a synthetic level.

Switching over to real-world file transfers revealed a slightly different story. It's worth noting that our transfers were from an internal mechanical hard drive; if you really wanted to maximise the speed potential of the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0, a system that also featured an internal SSD could give you superior performance. Then again, this is a portable external drive and it's quite feasible that owners of it will be plugging it into systems that aren't equipped that way.

Transferring a 624MB file to and from the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 took an average of 10.54s and 9.67s respectively, giving us an average read/write speed of 59.2MBps and 64.5MBps - figures that fall well below the manufacturer's figures. It's disappointing, but that's more to do with Kingston's hype than with anything else. To give those figures some context, we grabbed another flash-based storage device that happened to be sitting nearby: a USB 2.0 4GB Sony USM4GN Micro Vault Classic. A much cheaper drive, to be sure, but we plugged it in and ran the same file transfer tests. The Classic managed the same file transfer in a significantly more leisurely 136.51 seconds for an average 4.57MBps write rate and 34.49s for an average 18.09MBps read rate. In other words, while the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 may not live up to its own hype, it certainly blows anything USB 2.0-based out of contention - as it certainly should.

Conclusion

The Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 is a very fast drive under the right circumstances, and if all you need is raw speed in your external storage it's an excellent option. SSD prices have tumbled in recent years, but they haven't collapsed in the way that, for instance, standard USB flash drives have. The same AU$249 that the Kingston HyperX Max 3.0 will cost you could buy more than 2TB of external mechanical drive storage with enough change left over for overflowing pocketfuls of USB 2.0 flash drives, but neither of those options would be anywhere near as quick.

• Seagate BlackArmor PS 110 USB 3.0
• Western Digital My Passport Essential USB 3.0 1TB
• Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk (1TB)
• Hitachi LifeStudio Mobile Plus

• Near universal video codec support
• Supports 1080p
• Unique design
• Well-built remote control
• Aggressive in hunting down local content
• Wide variety of web content
• Good UI
• Constantly updated

• You could always build a Boxee system yourself
• Not all international content is actually available
• Notable pause before playing back any file
• Unusual shape won't fit in many AV cabinets
• Premium price for media streaming ease of use

Design

Media-streaming boxes are certainly plentiful on store shelves right now, but with the notable exception of Apple, very few vendors pay any attention at all to the physical design of their streaming boxes. They're generally just the cheapest small form factor box that can be procured from a Chinese factory. If you're lucky, somebody's given thought to where the USB ports should be, but even that can't be taken for granted.

Not so with D-Link's Boxee Box. It's fair to say that it doesn't look like anything we've ever seen in the media streamer space before. For something that carries such a nondescript suffix as "box", D-Link's gone all out (with help from design firm Astro Studios, which also puts together the original Xbox 360 design) with a cube-style design that's had most of one face chopped away, revealing a bright green interior. If you didn't know any better, it'd be easy to suppose that Boxee Boxes were meant to clip together in pairs. Where the design gets really quirky is that the bright green chopped away side is actually meant to be the base of the unit, hiding some of its most lurid features. As a box, you can always place it any way you'd like, but to make the most sense out of its cables and power button, green face down is the way to go. The green rubber bottom also gives it a fair amount of grip.

We really like the visual design of the Boxee Box itself, with only one obvious caveat. It's much taller than competing media streamers, and it's also an irregular shape, meaning it won't fit well within a lot of AV cabinets.

The remote is dual-sided with a full QWERTY keyboard.
(Credit: D-Link)

The remote control is likewise well designed while still being a little quirky. From the front, you're faced with the Boxee logo below a four-way pad with a central selector, menu button and play/pause button. So far, so regular. Flip the remote over and you'll find a full QWERTY keyboard, including cursor keys. You might think this is a recipe for accidental button presses on one side while you're using the other side, but in our experience this was pretty rare, thanks to the remote's thin design and solid construction.

Features

It's important when talking about the Boxee Box to split the software out from the hardware. The hardware part - the Box, in essence - is a simple nettop-style device, running an Intel CE4100 Atom 1.2GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of flash memory. The Box is just a streaming device with very limited cache, in other words. Out the back of the Box you'll find 10/100 Ethernet, HDMI, optical and RCA audio output and power connections; 802.11n Wi-Fi is also supported if you don't have Ethernet anywhere near your TV. As media-streaming boxes go, the Box itself is quite powerful with support for 1080p video, something that even the Apple TV can't manage.

Then there's the Boxee software, and this is both the genius of the Boxee Box and its biggest single sales flaw. Boxee is a free media centre application based itself on the open source XBMC media centre software. It's free to download and works across a variety of hardware types. If you want Boxee's features but don't want the box itself, the only thing stopping you doing so is a little time and patience. Boxee is constantly updated, adding new features, and also supports a robust apps-based model for accessing all types of web video. This goes well beyond the features that get added in dribs and drabs by other major players, and it's a big plus for the Boxee. Basically, if there's a video format or video-playing website out there, the Boxee Box will most likely play it, and if it doesn't, it almost certainly will soon. The notable exception to this are files with embedded Digital Rights Management, such as downloaded movies purchased from most online stores.

From an in-built applications viewpoint, Boxee will aggressively seek out video files on the local network for playback and then seek out relevant cover art and synopsis information for each file it finds. It's also possible to synchronise your social media accounts with your Boxee Box, allowing you to view videos recommended from most feeds directly on the Boxee itself. If you don't like the remote control for whatever reason, it's also possible to download free remote control applications for iOS or Android smartphones, using the touchscreen to run the full Boxee experience wirelessly.

The Boxee software will download movie posters and descriptions automatically (Credit: D-Link)

Performance

The Boxee interface, even on first install, is very slick and easy to manage. Once we'd sorted out our network connection, the Box noticed that a newer version of Boxee was available, and set to downloading it. This was slightly less refined than much of the rest of the install, with the word "CALC" displayed in plain type, followed by a countdown that froze a few times while downloading. As it counted down, it became apparent that the text should be giving us an approximate time to download, but for whatever reason, it didn't have a large enough text box, telling us instead that it would take "7 mi..." to finish.

Once that was done, we set up a Boxee account, which requires an email address you can verify from. This allows you to send RSS feeds of particular videos direct to your Boxee, as well as add your social-networking accounts so that the videos your friends send through can be viewed. Whether those videos are worth watching depends on the type of friends you've got - the Boxee Box can't do everything.

Once you've verified your account, the final step involves deciding on the primary way you'll use the Boxee Box. The choice is between choosing "mostly stuff from the web", "mostly my own files" or "I'm not sure", and it's possible to change this post-install; it primarily determines the way the main screen will come up at boot time.

The Boxee interface is easily one of the best on the market. The comparison with the Apple TV interface is an inevitable one, but the ability for Boxee to add applications (including web browsing) give it a boost over Apple's interface. Those of an adventurous mind should note that it is possible to hack the Apple TV to run Boxee, if you're keen.

From a local network media playback perspective, things were mostly positive with the Boxee Box. It quickly found our network shares and shared video, and grabbed synopses for the files it recognised. This included iTunes movies whose DRM the Boxee doesn't support, and there's no way to flag those files short of explicitly telling the Boxee not to index directories that contain them. It's also possible to directly navigate shared directories, but that way misses out on the ability to browse by cover art.

Long-term iTunes users are probably aware that it's not always the most accurate when it comes to picking covers and details, and this is a problem that plagues the Boxee as well. One of the family videos on our network that the Boxee Box picked up of kids in the bathtub was identified with the following description, based on Boxee's best guess from the file title:

Not quite, Boxee. Not quite.

The other noticeable chink in the Boxee Box's playback armour is that it pauses for about 10 seconds before playing back any file, irrespective of file size or codec. Compared to some cheaper players that take only a second or two to begin decoding, this is a little irritating.

The other side of the Boxee Box's offering is web video, and this is a much more mixed experience. On the plus side, it's a great way to find video on the web, with a constantly updated menu of movie and TV show choices. It's just that most of them aren't available in Australia. By default, the Boxee software shouldn't show sources blocked from your location, but we found plenty of videos that Boxee felt should be viewable that certainly weren't. In Comedy, for example, South Park was constantly at the top of the Most Popular list, but Comedy Central doesn't allow episode playback from Australian IP addresses. Again, those keen enough to sort out proxy details may be able to overcome this limitation, but they're probably more customers for a self-installed Boxee system rather than the ease of use approach of the Boxee Box.

Conclusion

If you're after a slick media-streaming box with a great user interface, it's easy to recommend the Boxee Box, but this does come with a few caveats. You're paying a premium for software that's free in and of itself, and if all you want is basic local network playback, there's no shortage of cheaper boxes out there. It's a great product, but it is priced at a premium level against its market competition.

• Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV
• WD Elements Play
• Astone Media Gear AP-110D
• Asus O!Play HDP-R1 Media Player

Unfortunately, the iPhone 4 Case Program has ended, which means Apple isn't giving out any more free cases. If you missed on this then take a look through the following selection &mdash we're sure you'll find something you'll like, or hate as the case may be (pun unintended).

There are cases here from Belkin, Cygnett, Griffin, Gumdrop, Hard Candy, Laser, Macally and PADACS.

We wrapped each case around an iPhone 4 and worked out which ones are duds and which are winners.

• Best iPad accessories
• Uniden Wireless Power Starter Kit
• Altec Lansing Orbit iM237
• Sony Ericsson W995

• Allows creative colouring in of enemies
• Non-violent
• There's no way to "die" for younger players

• Mini games are uninspired
• Colouring things in well is very difficult
• Pen Panic game requires precision - which is what the stylus lacks

Giving your title character a name such as "Dood" doesn't do much to infuse them with personality, but then that's the point of Dood's Big Adventure. Dood is quite literally a blank slate, a character that can be drawn upon using the uDraw tablet, which is a mandatory accessory for this particular game. Once Dood's been drawn on, he can launch into a variety of mini-games. As you play through each mini-game, you earn stars which can be used to buy new skins and unlock new game maps.

Dood's Big Adventure offers up four mini-games. In Pen Panic, you guide Dood through a simple platform game, nudging him where to go, building bouncy jump platforms with the stylus and hurling ink at enemies. Roly Poly is an odd Super Monkey Ball-style game that puts Dood in a sphere, but doesn't use the uDraw stylus or pen at all, instead getting you to tilt the whole uDraw apparatus to move Dood around. In other words, it may as well not require the uDraw tablet at all.

Bubble Trouble externally has the same idea as Roly Poly - Dood is once again trapped inside a bubble - but instead of tilting, you draw where the bubble should float through the air. Hit anything and the bubble bursts, costing Dood valuable bonus time. Like the rest of the mini-games, it's not possible to die or fail the level; you just get fewer points for doing so.

The final game, Fan Frenzy, uses the same floating through the air mechanic as Bubble Trouble, but instead of drawing where you want Dood to go, you blow him with a stylus controlled fan and can hit the edges of things. It's not a bad mini-game, but against two other games with a similar bubble theme, it also doesn't stand out a whole lot.

Using the uDraw tablet rather than a Wiimote for these kinds of games gives them an odd feeling that's most closely aligned with the kinds of games you get on Apple's iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad platforms. Rather than pressing a button to jump, you swipe, just as you would in many iPod Touch games. Those are games that are designed for very short portable play and Dood's mini-games are similarly shallow.

The other part of Dood's big adventure involves Create mode, which sits in the menus above the main Play section. This involves colouring in Dood and his various enemies and backdrops or purchasing pre-painted skins to apply to them. You can also purchase "Magic Canvasses", which are fairly basic colouring in pages. This is done in the same fashion as with other uDraw titles; you've got basic colouring brushes, fill buckets and so on and so forth.

Compared to Pictionary or even uDraw Studio, though, the tools are rather limited, especially compared to the results that you can get by buying "skins" for the enemies and animal backdrops. In order to make anything that's going to look good across three dimensions (given that some of the backdrop animals spin) is going to take a lot of time and a lot of patience - probably more than most of the kids who are Dood's core audience are going to have. Parents may also wish to note that there's no filtering of what's drawn onto the game characters; anything goes so you may wish to keep a close eye on certain children.

Along with testing from an adult perspective, we also tested Dood's Big Adventure with a group of children aged between four and eight years old. While they were initially taken with Dood, because it was a new game they'd not played before, they quickly decided that Pen Panic was too hard and not responsive enough, as was Bubble Trouble. Fan Frenzy was the favourite, but even within half an hour they were clamouring to play other Wii games, noting even at that age that the games were just simple tapping or tilting.

It shouldn't really be surprising that one of the first games for the uDraw represents one of the most over-exposed and over-exhausted genres in all of Wii gaming, namely the mini-game collection. While it's not surprising, it's equally not all that enthralling, partly because so many mini-game collections out there offer better value for money, but also because the mini-games within are on the dull and repetitive side.

• uDraw GameTablet
• Club Penguin Game Day!
• Wii Sports Resort
• Charm Girls Club: Pyjama Party

• Encourages creative play
• Wide range of available clues
• Clues for adults and kids
• Good drawing tools

• Very American clues
• Most tools won't be used in the heat of fast-paced gameplay
• Actual Pictionary is cheaper

THQ's uDraw tablet has drawing right in its title. Perennial family-friendly drawing game Pictionary, therefore, is a rather obvious choice for a game that the uDraw tablet should support.

Just in case you're not aware of what Pictionary is, it's a drawing charades-style board game where one player from a team is tasked with drawing something against a strict time limit, while the other member(s) of their team try to guess what it is. A simple concept that you can run yourself with a few ideas, a pencil and some paper. As such, a digital version has to try hard to overcome the basic fact that you can make a Pictionary game rather cheaply, and even if you did opt for the physical product, it can be sourced for a price somewhat below that of its digital version.

There's the obvious observation that a digital version will never run out of paper, or for that matter pencils. Pictionary also offers up two games modes. There's a standard Pictionary mode, which follows the basic rules of the game and Pictionary Mania, which sets specific rules for how you draw in each round. For one round, you might only be able to use the shapes tool, or another be limited to the line tool. It's a nice twist to the basic Pictionary idea, and it certainly forces you to use the more esoteric tools, but it does have a couple of problems along the way. Firstly, forcing players to use specific tools makes some clues nigh on impossible to decipher.

Secondly, it solidly highlights the fact that in regular Pictionary mode, you're likely to only use the basic pencil tool for most tasks. The additional tools are nice to have - and the game does offer up a free draw mode if that's all you want to do - but in the practical hectic play of the game, you'll often find yourself drawing simple pencil sketches purely because that's a lot more effective against the clock. Pictionary Mania is basically a forced way to get you to use the other tools, but it's not quite as much fun.

We'll pause briefly here to note that the game understands that the singular form of "dice" is "die". Call us pedantic, but we like that kind of thing.

There is fun to be had with Pictionary, arguably a little more than with the other currently available uDraw titles. When playing the regular game, you're given a choice of Adult or Junior questions. The only caveat here is that they're rather US-centric; as an example, for the clue "let's go out to eat", two options in the junior stream were "Burger King" and "Starbucks", for example. We'll allow the first, but how many junior players in Australia frequent Starbucks? Thankfully, if a topic is too obscure, or American, or you just figure your audience won't get it, you can select a fresh clue until you find one that fits.

So what are the advantages of Pictionary for uDraw over just playing it yourself? Well, the tools on offer are a little more extensive than most homes will afford - although you probably won't use too many of them in play. You won't run out of paper, or end up with hundreds of illegible sketches all over the house when you're done. Still, given that most board games translated to console lose all of their charm - yes, Hasbro Family Game Night Vol 3, we're looking at you - Pictionary stands out as a worthy digital game title, albeit one that's a fair bit more pricey (especially once you factor in the cost of the uDraw tablet itself) than its physical counterpart.

• uDraw GameTablet
• Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter
• Wacom Intuos4 Wireless
• Apple iPad

• Decent visual design
• Good overall performance
• Excellent graphics performance for a netbook-style computer
• Reasonable battery life if eco mode is engaged
• Good speakers

• Low battery life at maximum performance
• Memory allocation is low
• Windows 7 32-bit further limits memory upgrades

Design

The NB550D looks much like any other netbook, although that's an appellation that Toshiba probably wouldn't apply to this particular system. Unlike the vast majority of netbooks currently on the market, the NB550D eschews Intel's Atom platform for AMD's competing Fusion platform, similar to the Sony Vaio YB. Unlike the Sony, though, Toshiba's pricing for the NB550D puts it squarely in the sights of the cheaper set of Atom-powered netbooks. Does that make it a notebook? A netbook-style product? A notenetbook?

While its innards don't match up to the previous generation of netbooks, the style is undeniably still netbook-like. It's available in four colour variations; brown with dots, green with dots, orange with dots or blue with dots. The blue sample (technically the NB550D/00J PLL5FA-00J01S, but we're betting that's a name that only its mother uses) was the one we've tested, but having seen the range in the flesh, we've got to say that the blue and green are the standout choices. The blue, because it's perhaps the most sedate and ordinary of the designs (which many users may favour) and the green because it's undeniably lurid if that's what you like.

The NB550D has many of the high points and low points of the classic netbook design. You're not getting the full notebook keyboard experience, but Toshiba's design does at least stretch the keys out to the side of the netbook body, allowing for slightly larger keys and a more comfortable keyboard experience.

Features

Toshiba equips the NB550D with a low power 1GHz AMD C-50 CPU, or as AMD would prefer it be called, an APU, because built into the CPU die is an integrated Radeon HD 6250 256MB GPU. Intel's been in the integrated graphics business for a good long time now, but AMD's take on the concept offers a greater graphics performance promise, although it'll eat into the general memory for an additional 118MB of shared memory when it needs to.

The C-50 aside, most of the NB550D's offerings are more from the pure netbook playbook, including a 10.1-inch 1024x6000-pixel display screen, 250GB 5400rpm SATA hard drive, 802.11n Wi-Fi and 10/100 Ethernet and media card reader slot. Nice touches include three USB 2.0 ports, one of which supports sleep charging of external devices and an HDMI-out socket. Combined with the Radeon GPU, this gives the NB550D some genuine possibilities for high-definition video output, at least in theory.

There are two distinct problems with the NB550D's basic specifications and they both relate to memory. The on-board 1GB of memory is adequate but definitely shows its limitations when you've got multiple applications running. Nobody expects a netbook to fly through performance tasks, but it's pretty clear that upping the memory, even if only to 2GB as Sony did with the Vaio YB, would pay big performance dividends. Toshiba also pre-installs Windows 7 Starter Edition 32-bit, meaning that if you were to upgrade the memory, you'd be limited to just over 3GB of usable memory, a limitation the 64-bit version of Windows 7 doesn't have at all.

Speakers on notebooks are usually not worth specific mention, but in the NB550D's case, it looks as though whatever Toshiba saved on a lower memory specification went into dropping Harmon Kardon speakers on the front of the system. For a netbook, these sound great.

Performance

There's a common curse of many netbooks when it comes to PCMark05, and the NB550D was a full victim of this ailment. PCMark05 wouldn't run, despite many tweaks and patches and more than a moderate amount of cursing. Observationally, the NB550D performs well, but not at the level of a full notebook, something we'd put down to Toshiba's choice to only put 1GB of memory on-board. We're not sure if it's an upgradeable part, but any prospective buyer should at least think about it.

Graphics performance is meant to be a considerable part of Fusion's appeal, and here the NB550D didn't disappoint with a solid score of 1865 in 3DMark06. Again, that's slightly below the Vaio YB, but this is a cheaper system, and the difference between the two is less than the price gap might suggest. As a light graphics performance machine - and especially one if you wanted to play, say, World Of Warcraft on the go - the NB550D delivers.

All that graphics grunt left us wondering how well the NB550D's slender six-cell battery would perform. With all battery-saving measures disabled and screen brightness pumped up to full while playing back a video file full screen, it only managed to last three hours and 24 minutes, which isn't great in the netbook world.

The NB550D's power-saving measures include a low power "eco" mode, and engaging this gave us one of the more stark reminds that our battery life test really does present something of a worst-case scenario. With Eco mode enabled, the battery gave a further one hour and 43 minutes of video playback time for a much more respectable total of five hours and seven minutes. In significantly less formal testing, we were able to use the NB550D for writing and web surfing work through an entire work day without exhausting the battery.

Conclusion

From their conception, netbooks have been compromise devices. You're compromising on the amount of money that they take out of your wallet, and in return you get a compact work platform that's not about pure performance but should be adequate for basic tasks. The NB550D shakes that assumption up a little, given that it allows you to run more graphics-intensive applications, but again there's a small price to pay in terms of battery life. At the AU$499 price point, it's a significant challenge to the existing stock of Atom-based netbooks and a very worthy purchase option.

• Asus Eee PC 1005HA-H
• Acer Aspire One 532h
• Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2
• Lenovo IdeaPad S12

• Inspires creativity in children, rather than just jumping on the heads of their enemies
• Solidly built
• Wide variety of painting and drawing tools
• Can export drawings to SD card and out to a PC

• As yet games options are limited
• Background music in uDraw Studio will quickly drive you insane
• Stylus is sometimes imprecise
• Tricky to control Wii Menu choices when Wiimote is plugged into the tablet

Nintendo's Wii has been such a huge hit over the past couple of years that we figured we'd seen every possible peripheral. You can get weight sets. You can get microphones. You can even get Wii-compatible cricket balls. THQ's uDraw does take the Wii in an area we wouldn't particularly have predicted. It's a graphics tablet with an in-built stylus, designed for primarily drawing-centric games.

The uDraw tablet has a distinctly Fisher-Price kind of feel to it compared to the full graphics tablets we've reviewed in the past. The stylus is light and yet chunky, and the 4x6-inch drawing area sits within a white plastic frame that we suspect would get rather grubby and faded over time. It does suit the white style of the Wii, however. To the left of the drawing area sits a holding area for a single Wiimote, which sits within the tablet providing both power and the gyroscopic controls used for certain games. It's a necessary feature, but we quickly found it a little annoying. You've got to stuff the Wiimote in there fairly solidly, but doing so blocks the front transmitter on the Wiimote itself. Other peripherals have got around this problem by placing a small hole in front of the Wiimote, but the uDraw Tablet doesn't have this feature. The practical upshot of that design decision is that if you have a Wiimote plugged into the tablet, you'll have to gently pop it out in order to actually start anything from the main Wii menu. The uDraw titles we tested all allowed basic menu selection from either the D-pad or tapping on the draw area with the stylus, as suited the context of whatever we were doing at the time.

uDraw only comes with a single bundled software title, uDraw Studio. It's not a game per se, but instead an interactive drawing program. You start out by choosing language based on flag (tip for the easily confused; we need the British flag for English) and then select either a basic blank sheet of paper - although plenty of styles, from plain white paper to chalkboards are available - or colouring books with predefined lines.

uDraw Studio, to put it kindly, isn't Photoshop. Photoshop doesn't have annoying background music, for a start. As a basic creativity tool, though, it's fairly inspired. What particularly struck us was that it's not the best advertisement for what the uDraw tablet can actually do; the drawing tools in Pictionary feel a little more responsive than those in uDraw Studio, even though uDraw Studio has many more actual tools and pages to draw on. Then again, anyone buying the uDraw tablet is going to end up with uDraw Studio anyway.

Once drawings are complete, they can be saved for viewing in the Studio's Gallery mode or exported to SD card as standard JPG files for viewing elsewhere, which is a very nice feature.

Parents with kids permanently glued to their Wii could do worse than uDraw Studio, although at the same time you could always pick up a cheap graphics tablet such as the Wacom Bamboo for a roughly similar price.

As with any games peripheral, the real utility of the uDraw Tablet is going to come from any games or utilities released with it. Aside from uDraw Studio, we've checked out the two other games released for the tablet to date, Pictionary and Dood's Big Adventure, and THQ is promising further games throughout 2011. As it stands, the uDraw Tablet is somewhat fun for casual use, but limited in both what the technology currently delivers and compared to what could be done with a proper drawing tablet.

• uDraw Pictionary
• Wacom Intuos4 Wireless
• Wii Sports Resort
• Wii MotionPlus