Toshiba Portégé M750

The tablet PC soldiers on

Journey over to the right side and you'll be greeted by a multi-format card reader - SD, MemoryStick and xD - DVD burner, 56Kb/s modem and a slot for that all-important stylus. At the rear, Gigabit Ethernet, power, VGA and a third USB port complete the line-up.

One of the USB ports doubles-up as eSata

Our scales agreed with Toshiba's quoted weight of 2kg - if you need to drag the power adaptor, add 400g to this - which makes it light enough to hold in one hand while jotting down notes with the other, but only for relatively short periods of time – try keeping this up for more than half an hour and you'll start to struggle.

So how does the M750 perform as a tablet? Very well, actually. The 12.1in screen is large enough to jot down notes on without being too cumbersome and writing with the stylus feels natural, although we often fumbled when it came to using the small slither of a right-click button.

The stylus docks neatly in the machine - or in your pocket

Flip the stylus round and, just like a pencil with a rubber attached to the end, you can erase any mistakes by rubbing over the offending area. Furthermore, when scribbling with the stylus, the M750 will ignore your fingers, palms or any other parts of your anatomy that might be resting on the display. Move the stylus away from the screen and it will once again become touch-sensitive, allowing you to prod your way through Windows.

If you tire of hand-writing notes, the keyboard features nice, textured keys to tap away on. It does, however, feel a bit spongy during typing and we noticed a nasty amount of flexing. The half-height arrow keys are also awkward to use, as is the half-width left shift key, but what really annoyed us were the four rubber protective pads dotted along the front lip of the chassis – depending on where your palms sit during typing, these can become very uncomfortable.

Analog modem on board

We were also left disappointed with the trackpad, which would occasionally become unresponsive, while the left and right buttons exhibited the same sponginess as the keys.