Although notebook computers are cheaper today than ever before, it’s still rather unusual to see one for sale for less than £350.

What’s more, cheaper notebooks tend to be rather similar: most have a 15.4in widescreen display, and although they’re fairly powerful very few are light enough, or have a battery good enough, to be really portable.

Asus’s oddly-named Eee PC, then, is rather unusual. Not only is it a complete notebook computer that costs just £220 including VAT, but it’s both tiny and portable. There are several things that might put potential buyers off choosing the Eee over a conventional computer.

Firstly, its size can be troublesome: the Eee is tiny and when closed, it’s not much larger than two DVD cases stacked together. This makes it easy to fit into even the most cramped travel bag, but it also means that everything about the notebook is similarly small.

The keyboard, for instance, has keys that are minuscule and rather wobbly. It’s possible to type fairly fast if you have small fingers, but we wouldn’t want to write a long document on it. The battery itself is also fairly small, but will keep the Eee running for between two and three hours when surfing the web.

More importantly, the Eee has a small screen. The 7in display has a resolution of just 800×480 pixels, giving far less room for programs and documents than most notebooks. This also means that text is generally small, making it a poor choice for anyone with worse than 20/20 eyesight.

Another key difference between the Eee and a regular notebook computer is that, unlike most notebooks, the Eee doesn’t come with Windows XP or Vista. Instead, it uses a special version of the free Linux operating system. This uses clear menus with large icons that give access to all the free software included on the Eee. This includes the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird email program and the excellent OpenOffice suite, which can open and edit Word and Excel documents.

The downside of using Linux is that it’s not possible to install any Windows programs you might have, but with so much good software installed already there’s a good chance you won’t need to.

Finally, the parts used inside the Eee are rather different to those found in most modern notebooks. The processor, for example, is a simple and slow one rather than the fancy dual-core chips found in most notebooks, and there’s only 512MB of memory.

The biggest difference of all, though, is the fact that the Eee doesn’t have a hard disk. Instead it stores files and programs on 4GB of flash memory, the kind of storage used in a camera memory card. Over half of this is filled up with the programs that are installed as standard, so there isn’t much left, but it’s easy to add more storage space by plugging in an SD memory card.

Overall, the Eee is a mixed bag. For everyday computing or work it’s no substitute for a normal notebook computer running Windows with a big screen and keyboard, but as a tiny, portable way to surf the web wirelessly from the sofa, or for travellers on a budget, it’s brilliant.

Samsung plans to produce more low-priced phones to compete with market leader Nokia, according to Korean press reports.

The world’s second largest mobile phone maker will expand its cheapest product line by releasing up to six models retailing at $30.

“This is our ‘ultra low-end’ strategy to chase up Nokia,” an unnamed Samsung official told Korea’s Electronic Times.

Samsung spokesman Kim Tae-hoon confirmed the new strategy in a statement to media, saying that the firm will launch colour-screen handsets costing between $40 and $50 in developing markets including southeast Asia, India and Latin America.

Korean media reports claimed that Samsung could cut manufacturing costs to as low as $20 by sourcing some components from its own Flash memory, DRam and logic chip manufacturing businesses.

However, analysts warned that the cut-price strategy would inevitably hurt profit margins, which currently stand at just below 10 per cent for Samsung’s telecoms business.

Samsung’s average selling price across its entire phone range was $151 in the third quarter of 2007, compared to Nokia’s $120. Both figures come from company financial releases.

Samsung hopes to sell 200 million handsets in 2008, compared to an estimated 160 million in 2007, and to raise its global market share from 15 per cent to 25 per cent by 2010.

Market leader Nokia increased its share of the global market from 36 per cent to 39 per cent in the third quarter of 2007

The chief executive of General Motors told delegates at the Consumer Electronics Show that driverless cars will be a reality in a decade or less.

Rick Wagoner, delivering the first CES keynote by an automotive producer, said that advances in the automatic control of vehicles are bearing fruit, and unveiled a prototype Chevy Tahoe being developed by his company.

“The future of the auto is bright and increasingly electronic. Autonomous driving means that someday you could do your email, eat breakfast, do your makeup and watch a video while commuting to work,” he said.

“In other words, you could do all the things you do now while commuting to work but do them safely.”

General Motors plans to test driverless cars by 2015 and have them in production by 2018.

The company has been heavily involved in the move towards automatic cars, and provided the winning entry in this year’s Darpa Urban Challenge.

The cars of the future will also communicate with each other, according to Wagoner, so that if one has to break sharply the cars will behind slow down automatically.

General Motors is also introducing Stolen Vehicle Slowdown, a system that automatically shuts down the engine of a stolen car in an effort to cut the 30,000 high-speed pursuits that take place on America’s roads every year.

Wagoner also unveiled the Chevy Provoq, a concept car that uses a hydrogen fuel cell, a solar cell roof and lithium batteries for power. It can reach 0-60 in 8.5 seconds and run for 300 miles on a tank of hydrogen.

The VMP-008 music player, from new distributor Veho (we reviewed the company’s VFS-001 film scanner recently) is an impressively tiny device that includes 1GB of storage space.

That’s unremarkable in the context of the latest 160GB iPod, but this device is so small that you could swallow it and hardly feel it.

In fact, the player is shaped like a small lozenge and has no obvious buttons.

Instead there are two touch-sensitive pads on one side. These control both volume and playback (you hold them down for volume and brush them to change track back or forth).

It includes a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (and a pair of OK earphones), on a wire that doubles as a way to hang the player around your neck (it’s designed for runners and sports players).

Sound quality is very good, with plenty of life both in the treble and bass ranges. Our only qualm is that there’s no random or shuffle mode, so with no screen you’re limited to listening to the tracks in the order they were copied. Other than that, £50 for the smallest portable music player we’ve ever seen is a good deal.

Vista compatibility: Yes

Aztech’s V500-DS is a Dect cordless phone that works with both landlines and the Skype internet phone calling service.

The box contains the phone, a pair of AAA batteries and the dock, which acts as a charger and a hub for the various connections (it connects to both the phone socket and your broadband router as well as the mains).

As soon as we plugged everything in the phone started charging automatically, and before long we were able to make both Skype and normal calls. Logging into our Skype account was simple, as was the process of making calls.

The handset isn’t particularly ergonomic, but it looks good and it’s perfectly comfortable to use. The buttons feel a bit like cheap plastic but it’s fairly solidly built nonetheless. Call quality was slightly disappointing over both Skype and the BT network - our calls tended to suffer from generally poor quality and the sound dropped out momentarily more than once.

Oddly, it worked much better when we used the phone’s built-in speaker, which is satisfyingly loud. Battery life is good, with around eight hours of talk time, but the phone’s sound quality is what lets it down.

 The Powermonkey Explorer is designed for those who really like to get out into the wild, because it includes a solar charger.

So even if you’re miles from a mains socket you can still keep your camera, portable music player or mobile phone fully working.

The kit comes in a neat fabric case that can be zipped shut to keep all the many bits secure inside. It comes with both a mains charger and a solar panel, either of which can be used to charge the main cigar-shaped Powermonkey unit. The appropriate adapter for your device can then be plugged into the Powermonkey, with the other end in the device, and the monkey will charge the device.

European and American mains plugs are included in the kit, as are adaptors for all manner of phones, iPods (though you’ll need the iPod USB cable), portable gaming devices and more. Obviously, charging time depends on how much sunlight there is, but we were able to fully charge a phone from one charge of the Powermonkey. A full list of compatible devices is on the website - if your devices are listed and you’re going travelling this is an invaluable accessory.

An Australian PC retailer has come up with a novel way of supporting the ‘alternative’ software movement.

Tekfix Computing Solutions is offering a discount on products purchased online using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer.

The firm has the backing of Google and the Mozilla Foundation to switch internet users to the open source browser.

“We are looking to give people an opportunity to get away from the built-in browser that comes with Windows,” said Tony Schirmer, marketing manager at Tekfix.

“In my experience Mozilla has provided more security and a better overall experience when browsing the internet. We want to reward people who take the next step and try the browser for themselves.”

A five per cent discount is available when Firefox is detected on the coupon code entry, leaving all other shoppers with the full fee.

The move follows a similar effort by Google, which introduced paid referrals into its AdSense system, allowing any AdSense publisher to earn money from referring users to Firefox provided it contains the Google Toolbar.

The non-profit Mozilla Foundation has recently released the second Firefox 3 beta for testing.

Notebooks are becoming similar to desktop PCs in the level of power they offer, with the same high-end specifications and media features.

Described as a desktop PC replacement, the Easynote 17in notebook from Packard Bell is one example of the trend.

Although the Easynote is designed to replace a desktop PC, its weight and bulk still come as a surprise. It’s impossible to take it out of the house unless you happen to be a muscle man, and in most cases we would be disappointed to be stuck with it indoors, but this notebook’s dodgy design makes that a blessing in disguise.

The Easynote we looked at has a sparkling white ‘limited edition’ case that looks like it belongs in a Christmas grotto, and it looks a little out of place now the festive season is over. Its exterior could be excused if the insides were better, but they’re not.

The 17in widescreen, which initially looked promising, is disappointingly grainy and made our DVD movies look like pirate copies. The screen, which doesn’t have anti-glare coating, suffers so badly from reflections in bright light that it could double as a mirror.

Another complaint is the space allotted to the bottom half of the notebook that houses the keyboard, a round trackpad and the mouse buttons. The chassis is big but the keyboard is tiny, cramped and stuck right at the top, and although the keys are nice and springy, making it nice to type on, it is uncomfortable and cramped overall.

This wouldn’t be so bad were the rest of the space used for something important, but that’s not the case. Instead, users are left with a gaping white space that is only broken up by an illuminated strip on the wrist rest.

The round trackpad is so far away from the keyboard that even those with large hands would have trouble spanning a hand across to it from the keyboard. This - unsurprisingly - makes it very uncomfortable to try to type and use the mouse at the same time, and it slows things down as the user has to keep moving their hands from the keyboard to the trackpad and still further to the awkward mouse buttons.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The Easynote has 2GB of memory and an Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor, which makes it perfect for word processing and some less recent games. The 160GB hard disk is big enough for most media collections and it comes with built-in wireless networking and a webcam, a nice collection of ports including four USB sockets and HDMI for connection to high-definition TVs.

The notebook comes with Windows Vista Home Premium (which includes all the most useful parts of Vista, including Media Center). It also comes with Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 (which can be used for editing music, pictures and video), Norton 360 security software and Packard Bell’s Home Cinema software for watching DVDs and listening to music.

Available at PC World shops and online, the Packard Bell Limited Edition Easynote 17in costs £700, but we’d resist buying it in favour of a desktop PC that might be a little bigger but will certainly offer better features for the price.

It’s hardly surprising that people are concerned about security when the Government can lose the personal details of 25 million people in the post.

For those similarly concerned about their PC’s security it might be worth taking a a look at APC’s Biometric Password Manager.

The Password Manager consists of a ‘biopod’ – a small fingerprint reader that plugs into a USB port on the PC – and a piece of software called Omnipass that can record and manage multiple passwords on the computer.

The installation process is a little untidy, as it doesn’t come with a neat installation program. It’s necessary instead to use the Add New Hardware wizard to install the basic driver software that controls the reader and then run a second installation program from the CD in order to install the Omnipass software. This isn’t a major problem, though, and the Password Manager worked surprisingly well once we got through the initial installation.

The OmniPass software then asks the user to create an account by scanning and recording a fingerprint, which is a simple matter of placing a finger on the reader when told to by the software. Once that’s done, OmniPass runs in the background and automatically pops into action whenever it sees that the user is being asked to enter a password, in any program or website. It can also be used to lock specific files or folders so that they can only be opened by the person whose print is stored.

The Password Manager works particularly well with websites. The first time you visit a website that requires a user name and password, OmniPass prompt you to type them in as normal. However, the software then remembers those details and the next time you go visit that site the program will prompt for your fingerprint and automatically enter the password.

We doubt that the Password Manager would keep out a really determined hacker, but it should certainly be secure enough to keep passwords and sensitive files safe in the home or office. At just over £40 it’s not a bad investment if you’re concerned about privacy on your PC.

Many of us are used to typing away on computer keyboards, but there are still times when it’s better to take notes by hand.

Here at Computeractive we’ve all got old notepads full of scribbled notes, as do many students, teachers and others. So we were intrigued by Apcom’s Digiscribble, which is described as a mobile digital notetaker.

Digiscribble works like an ordinary pen, allowing the user to write notes by hand just as they would normally. It also includes a tiny transmitter that allows it to communicate with its base unit, a small sensor that clips onto your notepad (though the annoyingly small clips mean it’ll have to be a pretty thin pad).

The pen records the movements of your hand as you write and then transmits that information to the base unit. This stores the information in its memory until you plug it into a USB port on your PC, and it then transfers the information to the computer.

It’s a nice idea, but the Digiscribble’s effectiveness very much depends on which version of Windows the computer is running. If it is running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, the Digiscribble merely records an image of what you’ve written on the page, rather than recording it as text that can be edited. This means there’s no easy way of organising or editing the actual text of the notes – it merely provides a picture of each page.

The Digiscribble does include a trial version of an optical character recognition program called Myscript, which can attempt to turn that handwriting into an editable text file. Sadly this only works for 30 days: it’s then necessary to pay another $50 (£25) to get the full version.

That said, Vista Home Premium users (or anyone using a business edition of Vista) can use Vista’s built-in tablet PC software to actually record the handwriting as text and enter it straight into programs such as the Windows Journal (also included in Vista). In this mode, the Digiscribble works quite well.

The Digiscribble worked well with Vista once installed, but we had to struggle to get the device set up properly in the first place. The Quick Start guide provided with it is entirely inadequate and the electronic manual on the CD wasn’t much better: it took an hour or so of trial and error before we were able to start using the Digiscribble properly.

The Digiscribble could certainly be useful for many people – especially those who have Vista on their PCs – but Apcom really needs to make it a lot more user friendly before it can be recommended to anyone who isn’t already familiar with tablet PC technology.

Vista compatible: Yes

Saving energy has two good purposes: not only does it reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emited from power stations, but it also saves you money.

To do the job properly, though, you need to know how much energy each appliance in your home uses, which is a job for which Wattson is designed.

Wattson is a smart energy meter, with some useful extra features that separate it from most of the competition.

There are three main components: a sensor that clamps around one of the mains electricity cables coming into your domestic meter, a transmitter that attaches to the sensor and a display unit to be positioned anywhere within transmission range.

With its retro white and black acrylic case, the display unit has a faint hint of the kind of box electronics hobbyists used to use for home-grown projects, which adds a nostalgic touch to the product.

There’s no obvious display or meter on the box. Instead, a row of five pink digits (which can show letters and numbers) is displayed through the Wattson’s white acrylic top, showing either the current power use in watts or kilowatts or, with a quick flick of the unit, your electricity costs for the year if you were to continue running the home with exactly the same energy use. This is unlikely - energy use changes with days and with seasons - so the cost display is not hugely useful.

A bank of red and blue lights underneath the display also changes colour, depending on the power consumption. From blue to purple to red, you can see at a glance how energy hungry your home is.

The display unit uses rechargeable batteries so it can be carried around the house, and so it’s possible to unplug appliances in turn to check how the energy use changes as different things are in use. It can also be connected to a PC using the supplied USB cable and by downloading the Holmes software (see the name connection?) from the DIY Kyoto website, you can plot energy use over days, weeks or months to make a graph of savings. The main problems is that you’ll need to like the look of Wattson as a design installation as well as an energy meter to justify its relatively high price.

Netscape Navigator, one of the first web browsers has finally been dropped by AOL. 

Security patches and active support for the current version, Netscape 9, will only continue until 1 February this year. After this date AOL will urge users to adopt Firefox, developed by its not-for-profit offshoot, the Mozilla Foundation

The formal announcement from AOL which came at the end of December ends the years of struggle by AOL to regain the market share lost by Netscape to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers.

However, Netscape, which was once used by over 80 per cent of internet users, failed to regain the ground it lost and its share was down to 0.6 per cent in December 2007, compared to the 77 per cent Internet Explorer boasts.

In a formal statement on the official Netscape blog, AOL said: “While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

“Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser currently has around 16 per cent of the market share. Security patches for Navigator 9 and all previous versions will come to an end on 1 February along with active product support.

The Netscape.com portal will still be available, and the browser may still used and downloaded indefinitely. Nostalgia buffs can also give Firefox a Netscape look.