If you”re looking for a fat portable hard drive, Fujitsu’’s 500GB HD5 hits the spot. A simple black slab, it’’s pretty enough, but quiet operation is more important, and it didn”t irritate. Read-write speeds hit 20-25MBps ( xbench results ), and it ran just fine from the USB port. A USB power adapter is supplied for use with unpowered hubs or ports that won”t supply overcurrent. Fujitsu also claims it uses 35% less power in the long run compared to previous models, and provides a copy of Acronis True Image Personal Backup pre-loaded.

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Review: 20 minutes with Fujitsu’’s Handy Drive 5

Motorola’s Tundra is a phone built for abuse. Though simply specified given its $200 price tag — and that’s with a two-year contract — you can drop, kick and even get it wet and expect it to survive. Here’s video of it being flung hundreds of feet by a catapult. Here’s video of it being stomped, bashed with a rubber mallet, run under the tap, and driven over by a car . It’s military-grade, withstanding the benchmarks of dust, rain, humidity and temperature resistance outlined in MIL-STD-810F . According to Motorola, it will operate at between -10C and 55C, survive four-foot drops onto hard surfaces, and 15 minutes of use in heavy rainfall. That said, it’s still not a particularly great cellphone. It’s got a 3G GSM radio, push-to-talk and GPS. The menus are zip-fast, too, and the unit was perfectly reliable. But with little else to distinguish it from models that come free with cellular contracts, every penny of that stiff price tag is a waste if you don’t have use for the armor.

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Review: A few hours with Motorola’s Tundra

+ Small footprint, suprisingly stylish + 1366 x 768 Touchscreen works well + Custom Opera browser designed to be touch-surfed + Affordable + Fanless, silent. + Perfect for a kid’’s bedroom - Nettop performance not top of class - No optical drive or TV Tuner - Would make a poor main machine Asus” Eee Top is a suprise: a cute all-in-one with a great touchscreen and an equally great price. At just $600, it’’s little more than half the price of HP’’s cheapest TouchSmart. Yes, the 15.6″ screen is small, and performance isn”t stellarit’’s a desktop version of a popular line of netbooks, after all–but it makes a neat second computer for the kitchen or a kid’’s bedroom. Inside is a 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It weighs 9 pounds and has a webcam, an SD/SDHC card reader, ethernet, WiFi, and a generous five USB ports. The ambient blue light at the bottom can be dimmed or turned off, and there was no audible fan noise. It even looks nice, with an understated but classy design (in white or black) and matching keyboard and mouse. It also comes with a chunky stylus for getting at small icons. Eee Top runs Windows XP, and has a nicely-designed touchscreen menu/nav program to make it easy to jump to the included apps and games. Unfortunately, it didn”t seem possible to customize it. Included are a selection of Eee-branded apps and games, such as Eee Cinema for watching movies, Eee Cam for recording and dressing up webcam input, and Eee Memo, for taking handwritten notes. The best of them is a custom edition of Opera, designed with touchscreen browsing in mind. A few changes would be nice. There’’s no optical drive (Asus will soon offer a matching USB external as an optional upgrade), and I often found myself wishing it had a TV tuner. A larger, more powerful version would also be welcome. Given its obvious limitations, I”m not going to knock the Eee Top: it’’s perfect for a dozen niche roles, from the office’’s reception desk to your offspring’’s lair. Just don”t replace your main machine with it, O.K.? Product Page [Amazon]

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Review: A day with Asus” Eee Top

Yay + Very small and light, but still has a great keyboard + 1600×768 display + Fanless and completely silent + Stunning looks + 3G networking and GPS built-in Nay - You’ll need to upgrade to Windows XP or Windows 7 to get the most out of it. - 200 dpi display means text is tiny - Expensive, and so are accessories - Intel GMA 500 video drivers badly need updating - Disabled SIM card slot It is beautiful, an engineering marvel. It is fanless, silent and slim. For anyone who’s ever hated carrying a briefcaseor wanted a computer that goes well with Gaultierthe Vaio P is the ne plus ultra of ultraportable computers. For the rest, it’s a $900 laptop that can barely keep up with netbooks half its price. Sadly hobbled by Windows Vista’s bloat, only those with undemanding performance requirements will enjoy it straight out of the box. Install XP or Windows 7, however, and its promise becomes more apparent. About as small as a laptop can be while retaining a decent keyboard, the P is 9.7″ x 4.7″ x 0.8″ and weighs just 1.4 pounds. It has a high-definition 8″ LED-backlit display, 2GB of RAM, 3G internet, WiFi and GPS. The base model has a 60GB hard drive, with optional SSD upgrades. That keyboard is nearly full-size, and in the chiclet style long used by Sony and Apple, recently adopted by cheaper brands. It has a GoBi radio, which means in principle that it can get 3G data from both Evdo and HSDPA networks. In the U.S., however, it is exclusive to Verizon. U.S. units also lack the faster processors available in Europe and Japan (you can buy imports from Dynamism ) but gain integrated GPS, a feature not found abroad. It’s a nice package, for sure, but it uses a slower version of Intel’s Atom chip, the Z520, which leaves it huffing and puffing to keep up with cheaper alternatives like the HP Mini. Battery life is also poor: you’ll get a little over 2 hours on balanced settings. The long-life battery doubles that, but makes the P about a third of an inch thicker. Small type on the 200dpi display can be hard on the eyes. The track-nub is surprisingly good there was simply no space for a trackpad but some people find it irritating and difficult to use. More disappointing was poor video and gaming performance, even accounting for the low specifications. This is almost certainly a software issue: Intel and Sony need to step up and provide better drivers for the P’s GMA 500 video chip. While it looks gorgeous, the plastic finish is fingerprint-friendly and it doesn’t feel very durable. It’s hard to talk about the Vaio P without talking about its ads. After announcing it at CES to the technology tribes, Sony turned its marketing attention to professional women, deploying a bizarre campaign centered around robot fashion mannequins who wandered Manhattan making geolocated Facebook updates. At a party at the company’s Madison Avenue flagship store, I got to observe the mannequins do their thing–stand very still, looking pretty, holding Vaio Ps out for the fashion press to nervously inspect. It’s art, and I kind of liked it, but it makes one wonder just how much it would have cost Sony to make sure OpenGL worked better. Whoever Sony wants to sell it to, here’s who I think will like it: portability junkies who find netbooks too cumbersome, but who still want a usable keyboard. If the idea of that appeals to you and you’re prepared to pay for it go for it. If you’re even slightly ambivalent, however, wait until Windows 7 is out so you can avoid the hours of tinkering that the Vaio P demands to get the most from it. Product Page [Sony]

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Review: A month with Sony’s Vaio P