Approximate price: Rs 19500

If it wasn’t for its AMD Radeon HD 6470M GPU, this notebook would probably have never been featured here. If you don’t play AAA games or watch HD videos you probably won’t care about having a good graphics card on your machine, but for people looking for an all rounder cheap notebook, this ASUS is a real value for money. So, the GPU in question isn’t a very fast one, but has support for Direct-X 11 and will run all your favorite games that’s coming at the end of the year at a playable framerate (+50 FPS) in low settings on the 15.6 inches screen of 1366×768 pixels. A bad GPU on a machine is like a person having a bad sight.

The 4 GB of RAM given is generous considering the price, the hard disk is a 320 GB one and the Core i3-2330M @ 2.2GHz matches the Core-i5 laptops found here and here in terms of performance.

You wouldn’t expect an HDMI port on this laptop but there’s one, at the expense of having only two USB ports (one being 3.0 version). The 8x optical DVD drive can read/write dual layer discs. For more detailed specs of the laptop, visit the link below.

This laptop doesn’t have a numeric keypad due to the screen size of 14 inches, which has same display resolution as many 15.6 inches, that is 1366×768 pixels and comes with an old (2010) but powerful ATI graphical processing unit, the Radeon HD 5650, which has support for Direct-X 11.

The amount of RAM available on this laptop is a bit too low for a laptop on sale in 2012; 2 GB of RAM, but with the help of the Intel Core i5-560M CPU (clocked at 2.66 GHz), the performance will be nearly four times better than a regular netbook (mini laptop). In terms of storage, the SATA hard disk sports 500 GB of space and the DVD drive can read/write double layer discs.

Other specs the notebook has includes an Ethernet port, integrated Wi-Fi card, Bluetooth v2.1, a 4 in 1 card reader that supports SD Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Multimedia Card, a webcam with SmartFace Technology, two 2.0 USB ports and one USB/e-SATA combo port. The operating system given is Windows 7 Home Premium (32 bit) and needless to say that it comes with a lot of unnecessary software (bloatware).

Warranty: 1 year

If for some reason you are looking for a very different mobile operating system on a smartphone, then why not give a try this Samsung which runs on Windows Mobile 6.5 standard. For those who know Windows Mobile 6.5, they’ll notice that the “Start” is placed at the bottom as opposed to the top for touchscreen Windows mobile 6.5 devices or Windows mobile 6.1.

Still on the software side, there’s Pocket Office editor for opening word, excel, powerpoint and even pdf files, Outlook mobile for managing e-mails, Internet explorer mobile 6 (adobe flash lite) for browsing the web and finally, Windows media player 10 for playing music (mp3, wav, wma) and video files (avi, wmv, mp4).

Powered by a 1500 mAh battery, it should have an autonomy of about 600 hours in stand-by.

It does not perform very well in terms of cameras, yes it got two, the rear one having a 2 MP captor and shoots videos in QVGA (320×240) resolution at 15 frames per second, the front one for videocalling (can be used with skype) is of 0.1 MP.

Being a mainly a business smartphone, it surprisingly has some entertainment features such as Stereo FM radio, 3.5mm audio jack, bluetooth 2.1 support, microUSB 2.0 port and internal storage space of 220 MB which can be extended with a microSD card of 16 GB maximum (that’s more than enough for storing loads of office files).
Unfortunately there’s no HDMI port, which could have been useful for displaying presentations during business conference on a compatible projector or LCD TV.

While it has all the necessary network support for swiftly browsing the web (3G+, Wi-Fi b/g/n) the small display size of 2.4 inches (320×240 pixels) may make your navigation claustrophobic.

Smartphone with Windows mobile 6.5 within the same price range available in Mauritius: Sony Ericsson Aspen

The low resolution screen of 128×160 pixels isn’t very beautiful, but for less than Rs 2000, you’ll get a phone that’ll be doing almost everything that a normal smartphone does but in lower quality; take pictures in 640×480 pixels, record videos in 128×96 pixels at 15 fps, browse the internet at a slow speed of 48 kbps (GPRS), listen to the radio, share files via bluetooth, store images, videos and music on a microSD card of 8 GB maximum, install and play Java ME games or apps. This mobile phone even has support for dual SIM, has a flashlight, a microUSB 2.0 port and a 3.5mm audio jack. With all these capabilities, it can easily make you forget that it also make calls and send text messages.

The many netbooks (ie: small laptops of 10 to 12 inches) that infest the market today are powered by Atom CPUs and for those who have absolutely no knowledge about them, the best Atom CPU (N2800 @ 1.86GHz) is only twice as good as an old Pentium 4 @ 2.8 GHz. That’s a good performance many would say, but that’s totally wrong in terms of value for money because you can get this Core i3-330M (2.13 GHz) laptop for Rs 5000 more, which is nearly five times better than the Pentium 4 @ 2.8 GHz (assuming that the usual netbooks on sale in mauritius are about Rs 15000).

The mobility that many would find in the 10″/12″ netbooks is gone with the 15.6″ screen on this Lenovo (2.58 KG), but its not like you are stuck with an operating system where you cannot change the desktop background; Windows 7 Starter is found on most netbooks and Windows 7 Home Basic is installed on this one.

You can also burn DVDs/CDs with the DVD/RW drive with this laptop, as opposed to most of the netbooks which don’t even have a CD drive.

3D gaming is barely possible on netbooks, even when they are equipped the with the Nvidia ION, they are always lagging or under minimum requirements because of their Atom CPU. With the Nvidia GeForce 310M (512 MB VRAM) found on this laptop, no worries about letting your kids have an enjoyable experience with 3D games and even when watching 1080p videos it won’t drop as many frames as a feeble netbook.

As far as storage space and memory is concerned, there’s a 320 GB hard drive and 3 GB of RAM. Other specs it has are Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth and an integrated webcam.

Warranty: 3 years.
Battery warranty: 1 year.

For more information, download the datasheet in PDF format in the link below.

The appearance of this Asha reminds a lot of the E6, but this phone does have some specs which exceeds the pricier E5. The screen for example, is 0.04 inches bigger than those of the E5, that is 2.4 inches, and has a resolution of 240×320 pixels.

The phone is powered by a 1 GHz ARM11 CPU, and as you guessed it, its probably because of Angry Birds Lite (more levels can be purchased from the ovi store) preinstalled on the device. The tiny amount of 128 MB RAM is enough as the phone runs on the good old Symbian S40; No multitasking, but a lot of (old) Symbian (sis) apps should run properly.

Even though the 3.2 megapixel camera is a downgrade off the E5, it can still record videos in same resolution (640×480) and (pitiful) framerate (15 FPS) as its older brother.

In terms of connectivity its very well equipped considering the price; GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA(3G+), Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and a microUSB port.

To make the most the QWERTY keyboard, there’s already a push email client which supports Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail, social network integration with facebook, twitter and orkut, WhatsApp (a cross-platform instant messenger) and a Youtube app (Flash lite 3.0).

The phone also has a standard 3.5mm audio jack, a microSD card slot (32 GB maximum, hot-swappable), 100 MB of internal storage space and FM radio receiver.