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.

Once upon a time, the idea of watching videos through a spectacle-like device was a thing for science fiction. As we progress, realisations of human imagination come to be, one after the other. Vuzix is a company famous for creating wearable screens, one of which is the iWear AV920 model. 

Vuzix AV920 features a 62-inch virtual big screen. It reportedly works on almost any audio/video device with video out connectivity, even the video ipod. The company touts iWear AV920 as the “best mobile experience yet” what with its high resolution visuals. Usable for five hours before the lithium-ion battery runs out, what better way to spend time idly during the Holidays

As of late, there are rumours circulating that Vizux would be releasing a revamped version of the iWear AV920. One of the rumoured upgrades would be the ability to create a chain of interconnected AV920s for gaming on a single console. Whether the upgrades are true or not, we could only wait and see.

Gone are the days when USB flash drives equal limited storage space. The new Buffalo release even surpasses the already impressive 64GB USB flash drive. Buffalo, a Japanese company, introduced a new 100GB USB flash drive to the consumer market.

It uses Buffalo’s TurboUSB technology which makes it 24% faster than ordinary. Using both MLC and SLC and hence, forming a hybrid, the new Buffalo USB SSD flash drive is about as big as a business card and weighs 2 ounces.

The price? Get this: a whopping €664 for the 100GB flash drive. You won’t catch me dead shelling out that much cash for anything similar in nature. But hey, if you have cash to burn, why not?

What with the iPod’s domination of video and music players it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are other brands, but the Zen 4GB from Creative is well worth considering.

Such a player can hold some 1,000 songs. We didn’t fill it up, but after adding three average-length films and 250 songs we still had room for more.

The Zen 4GB has a 2.5in screen and is capable of video playback at full speed - some players drop frames from the video, making watching action films less fun, but that’s not a problem with this one.

An extremely clear screen and great sound quality from the supplied headphones often made us think we were viewing video from the comfort of a living room. Luckily we remembered just in time before trying to get comfortable and put our feet up on the train’s seats.

The music player is sleek and small, and fitted easily into a pocket. However, the navigation buttons, which sit on the right-hand side of the player, are small and fiddly to use, especially if your fingers are larger than average.

Once we had mastered it, navigating the attractive menu system was straightforward. The index navigation, which lets users search by the initial letter of each artist, is impressive and made it quick and easy to find songs. Album of the Day, on a click, chooses a random selection of tracks from a random album and plays them, which also meant not having to keep taking the player out of our pocket.

As with video, audio quality is excellent, and even at full blast it retained its class, with clear and undistorted music at deafness-inducing volume. The FM tuner worked well. A battery life of up to 25 hours of music playback is claimed, and we were able to watch a 90-minute film and listen to several hours of music without any problems.

It plays lots of common video formats and unlike the iPod, music and video can be transferred with a standard USB cable and Windows.

When the seat is down, the LavNav shines a gentle green light across the seat. When the seat is up, the LavNav’s shines a red light directly into the bowl.

Small speaker sets almost always suffer from poor quality sound - that’s pretty much down to physics, because the speaker cones are simply not big or deep enough to move the large amount of air required for deep, loud bass sounds.

Technology is improving, though, which leads us to Sony’s SRS-T10PC, which is designed for notebook users and plugs into such a computer’s USB port.

Power is supplied by the computer through the same connection and there are no controls on the speakers - everything is set in Windows, which automatically recognises the device when it’s plugged in (it appears in Windows as ‘C-Media Headphone Set’).

Sound quality was better than we expected from the speakers, which are only 15cm across and a couple of centimetres deep. Bass response is fair - you won’t be able to get any parties started, but it beats the internal speakers of almost any notebook PC, and if you want to listen to a bit of music or watch videos while on the move, the SRS-T10PC offers an excellent compromise between portability and quality, all at a decent price.

This is an attractive white desk ornament, eye-catching yet tasteful. Turn it around and… ooh, it’s a bit rude!

It’s a cat bum pencil sharpener!

Insert your pencil where the sun doesn’t normally shine and it meeeeeows. Well, you would too!

Nicely stylized and crafted from high quality materials to feel just as good as it looks!

Imagine the gasps and giggles when you demonstrate it at work (it had us sniggering for ages!)

Tea is without a doubt the greatest hot beverage ever invented by man. How do you make your Cuppa even better? Easy, you add biscuits for dunking! What better way to transport your chosen Biscuit and ensure they are handy for dunking than with the Dunk Mug with Biscuit Holder!?

Equipped with a genius ‘pocket’ which holds up to three standard sized Digestive biscuits, although obviously you can transport your particular biscuit of choice be they Digestive, chocolate covered Rich tea, Hob-Nob, or whatever other sort of dunker you could want!

Just think of the potential dropped and crushed biscuits, and spilt tea that could be saved by only having to concentrate on carrying one thing! You could possibly even fill the mug up a little bit more than usual to allow an extra gulp of tea!

Mouse design now tends to favour gamers who want mice with lots of shortcut buttons and fast speeds.

The Saitek Photo Mouse, on the other hand, makes a rather good present for home users, with the ability to use your own picture inside the transparent case.

As a mouse it is comfortable to use and the blue light shining from behind the wheel is unobtrusive. It uses a wired USB connection but that means there are no battery problems. No drivers are required - for once ‘plug and play’ really worked, with Windows detecting it automatically.

The photo is held in place behind a clear panel at the back of the mouse and there is a white light to illuminate it. A small button releases the clear cover to change the photo.

There is a cut-out template in the manual to fit a photo in place, and a slightly more polished look is possible by downloading a template file from the Saitek website. The template is in a variety of formats but does still require some knowledge of using image editors.

We like the Photo Mouse and found ourselves using it for day-to-day tasks, a refreshing change after trying some of the more gimmicky gaming mice.

If your work or home office  isn’t looking as festive as it might, then for £6.95 you could make all the difference with this  USB-juiced Crimbo tree

. Ho ho ho, indeed.

Britons are sitting on £23bn worth of electrical items which they no longer use, according to research.

Personal finance website Fool said each household has around £375 worth of unwanted but usable gadgets gathering dust in cupboards and attics.

A survey of 2,000 people found that one in five (18 per cent) were upgrading such items less than every two years.

As a result of digital television, nearly half (41 per cent) of those surveyed said they owned a video/DVD player they no longer used. The mobile revolution has also meant that one third of people have a mobile stored away in a cupboard.

Young people were found to be the biggest culprits with just over a quarter of 18-24 year olds buying the latest high-tech items to keep up with current trends. Men were also twice as likely as women to upgrade gadgets.

Fool blamed purchasing habits on the hype that surrounds new technologies when they first come into the market.

David Kuo, the company’s head of personal finance, said: “Often it can be better to bide your time until the euphoria surrounding the next must-have gadget dies down. The only must-haves you need are long-term financial goals to keep you from being distracted by short-term temptations.”

Waste Watch an environmental charity agreed. It estimated that around one million of tonnes of electronics were discarded every year.

Sam Jarvis, a representative for the charity, said: “We all have old mobile phones and redundant VHS machines around the house that we no longer use.

“The best thing we can do is to go for quality rather than quantity. It is much better to buy things that will last instead of constantly having to replace items that may look nice, but do not have a long lifespan.”

Jarvis also advised consumers to check with their council to see what materials were accepted for recycling at the public tip.

However, according to figures by Fool, some gadgets do not lose their value. For example, a Nintendo Wii is still estimated to cost the same price as it did this time last year. Therefore if recycling or giving gadgets away is not really something that appeals, selling them on Ebay or through specialist gadget sites such as Buysellgadget can also be a good way to get some money back.