The Acer TravelMate 8481G weighs only 1.6kg and is 25mm thick (with the lid closed). It's a 14in laptop with a low-voltage Intel Core i5 CPU, NVIDIA graphics, 4GB of RAM and a 120GB solid state drive.

such as the HP ProBook 5330m, but it's not far off the pace and it offers a good balance between performance and Acer AS09A61 Battery   life. The TravelMate has a 44 Watt-hour battery and it lasted 3hr 49min in our rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise screen brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video; this is a good result. (For this test, the notebook used NVIDIA Optimus technology to automatically switch from the NVIDIA graphics adapter to the Intel HD 3000 graphics in the Core i5 CPU.)

The touchpad is 92x53mm, which is a comfortable size, but its responsiveness wasn't great when we used multi-finger ThinkPad T60 Battery    gestures. Two-finger scrolling often started with a stutter and three-finger flicks were sometimes not recognised.

The 14in screen has decent colour and viewing angles and it won't reflect light sources thanks to its matte finish. Its bezel is very thin, but the screen's 1366x768 resolution doesn't extend all the way out to meet IBM ThinkPad X60 Battery  instead, you get a black border between the screen and the bezel, which is a little off-putting. It has adequate brightness, but it can be hard to view outdoors on a bright day — like almost all laptops on the market.

Around the edges of its thin base, the TravelMate has four USB ports (one which is USB 3.0 and one which Apple A1280 Battery also doubles as an eSATA port), an HDMI port, Gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom NetXtreme), VGA, and headphone and microphone ports. You also get a webcam, Bluetooth, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi (Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205) and Wi-Di support.

With these features, a thin profile and a good configuration that feels speedy during everyday use, the TravelMate 8481G is definitely worth considering if you also want something that's easy to carry, good looking and comfortable to use (for the most part). It has almost all the XPS M1530 Battery features we look for in business laptops, but we do think it could use a built-in 3G module.

And despite the laptop's incredibly svelte size, Sony crams a full-voltage Core i5 or Core i7 processor into it. Our review Vostro 1000 Battery model came with a Core i7 2620M and 4GB of RAM. It also carried a 256GB solid-state drive, and the combination powered the system to a very impressive WorldBench 6 score of 138 -- one of the highest scores we've seen for an ultraportable laptop. Amazingly, the Precision M90 Battery   lasted for 5.5 hours, about an hour less than the batteries on most recent ultraportables have managed, but quite impressive considering the horsepower under the hood.

But every so often, the company bucks common trends with a Inspiron 6400 Battery product that is clearly ahead of the curve -- and very expensive. These special laptops remind us of olden days when a Sony TV or music system carried a huge price premium but virtually guaranteed superior Inspiron 6000 Battery    design and quality. The new VAIO Z is one of those rare, ahead-of-its-time, money-is-no-object Sony laptops.