It is almost impossible to choose which one’s better and require a planned purchase. On the one hand, Toshiba impresses with its best-in-class touchpad, excellent keyboard, spacious 250GB hard disk drive, full-workday, 9-hour battery life and classy appearance.

Whereas the HP mini weighs in with its admirable performance in handling not just high-definition video super smoothly; nay, beautifully, on its 11.6 inch screen, but also processor muscle-sapping games like World of Warcraft without wincing because of its Nvidia Ion aided graphics capabilities.

The last few months have proved that Microsoft’s newest born is the most refined and evolved OS to have beamed out of Redmond yet. It is, without doubt, more stable and simple to use than its previous avatars. It is also, more fleet-footed than any Windows we’ve known so far — with faster startups, faster performance, faster resumes (from sleep mode), faster shutdowns — and even faster recovery from crashes! Battery life on laptops and notebooks is much meliorated. It enhances productivity by improving on its intuitiveness, ease of use and connectivity. And unlike Vista, Windows 7 can run comfortably on everything from low-end 1GB RAM netbooks and beyond.

When it comes to eminently pocketable camcorders, the MinoHD stands out by a whisker. Capable of very good quality 720p video for a device this diminutive (116 grammes, 1.97 x 0.66 x 3.94 inches), the super-sleek and stylish ultracompact is easy enough for even your grandmum to operate. It features a bright 2-inch TFT active matrix LCD display, 8GB memory, a built-in condenser mono microphone, an onboard speaker, and USB as well as HDMI connectors. Further, an in-camera editing feature makes it possible to snip away at what the focus-free 35mm, F/2.4 aperture lens captures without hooking it up to a PC or Mac.

An Apple baby that makes grown men gurgle with joy. Lighter (at 2.9 kgs), thinner (at 0.98 inches), faster, and more environmentally-friendly than other notebooks, this aluminium-encased bundle of computing offers an amazing 8 hours of battery life on a single charge. Powered by a 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed, the notebook is hewed out of single blocks of aluminum (called “unibody”). It supports up to 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory, and comes with a 500GB hard drive. The 17-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen 1,680-by-1,050 display is driven by an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics processor.