MITSUBISHI 5 DOOR-CAR iMiEV:The iMiEV's exterior is frankly something of a love or hate affair, though our test car was hardly flattered by all the advertising and information logos that Mitsubishi had plastered all over it. Of course, the basic shape, with its rather bulbous cabin and extremely short front and rear overhangs, has nothing to do with the specific needs of electric propulsion since it's carried over from the petrol-driven Mitsubishi 'i' city car, a vehicle not available in the UK.
Either by happy coincidence or some inspired forward planning, the rear-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive platform of the original i lent itself perfectly to a leccy reinvention with the electric motor, inverter and associated technology taking the place of the petrol engine and fuel tank, and the lithium-ion battery pack sitting under the floor.
Once you settle behind the wheel in the rather upright driving position, the overwhelming impression in one of great space and excellent visibility. The second thing that hits you is that interior is remarkably unremarkable. Where is the expanse of LED instrumentation telling you how many trees you are saving? Thankfully, they are nowhere to be found. Instead, you get a workaday instrument set, three-dial aircon and basic CD entertainment system. Strangely in this day and age, the iMiEV lacks an MP3 jack or iPod dock.
The instrument binnacle has been designed to be as twit proof as possible. A large LCD speedometer is surrounded by a power-demand gauge that runs from blue – energy being returned to the battery pack via regenerative braking – through green – the normal driving mode, with no excessive demand being placed on the battery pack – to grey. With the needle in the grey are you're seriously depleting the battery pac.

Latest Honda -5 door car:
Honda has been shown a clean pair of heels by Toyota. This situation is graphically underlined by the fact that Toyota's Prius is currently on its fourth incarnation since its launch in 1997, while the Honda's Insight is only on its second since 1999. Between 2006 and the launch of the new model, the Insight didn't exist at all.
So has the new Insight been worth the three-year wait?
It probably wasn't ideal timing for the new Insight to arrive on the forecourt at the same time as the latest Prius. After all, they look alike, have broadly similar powertrain concepts and are probably the only two hybrids the man in the street could name if you stopped him and asked.
The Insight's exterior styling is certainly eye-catching but it's also not wholly dissimilar - again - to the latest Prius. Honda prefers to emphasise the Insight's similarity to its hydrogen-powered big brother, the FCX Clarity. Line all three cars up and remove the badges, and many people would struggle to tell them apart, suggesting that this is the shape you get when you ask a large computer to design an aerodynamically efficient five-door hatchback.
Honda hasn't revealed the Insight's coefficient of drag, but we'd be very surprised if it's far off the Prius' figure of 0.25 – an identical figure to that of the original and ruthlessly streamlined Insight. Unlike the Civic Hybrid, the Insight doesn't use wind-cheating wheel trims. Apparently, European car buyers think they are as ugly as sin.
Slippery the design maybe, but that wind-cheating roof line and narrow rear comes at the expense of rear visibility which is very poor and made worse by the solid bar that divides the upper and lower parts of the tailgate window. Even with the elephant-ear wing mirrors, reversing can be a worryingly hit and miss affair.
Hybrid electric drive comes courtesy of a 13.8bhp (10.3kW) electric motor that also produces 58lb-ft of torque. That's a considerably less powerful leccy motor than the one to be found in the Prius, which is rated at 80bhp and 153lb-ft.

TOYOTA PIRIUS 4  genration car:
it's still the one nine out of ten motorists will think of when you say the word 'hybrid'. You can thank Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio for that, and the fact that Toyota have sold 1.2 million of the things since the first one rolled off the production line back in 1997.
For the Prius' fourth incarnation, Toyota has delivered a car that is entirely new. And so it needs to be because Honda is also now competing for hybrid market share with its equally clean-sheet-of-paper Insight - 
We said all that needed saying about the physical similarities between the Insight and the Prius when we reviewed the former in August. Driving the Prius has only reinforced the similarities. A couple of casual observers even asked when we had changed the colour of our car.
Despite being marginally longer overall and in wheelbase than the Insight – 4.46/2.70m vs 4.40/2.56m – the Prius is only slightly more spacious in the rear. While boot space is also a little better, you still won't be using it to shift wardrobes about. Sit up front and there's very little in to choose between the two cars when it comes to space.
Rear visibility is another feature that is equally poor in both the Prius and the Insight, but our top of the range T-Spirit test car came with a handy combined satnav and rear-view camera which made reversing less of a gamble - as did rear headrests smaller than those found in the Insight.
Settle in behind the wheel of the Prius in the rather stiff seats and press the on/off button – nothing so arcane as a key here – and... nothing happens. Well, nothing other than the central LED dash display coming on and the word Ready appearing.

New Garman Nuvi 1340t:
he Nüvi 1340T will be the one satnav you won't want to leave stuck to your dashboard. With an easily portable slimline design, the Nüvi 1340T features a pedestrian mode that includes the ability to hold your hand on London's underground network.

The 4.3in widescreen display has a resolution of 480 x 272, while the chassis weighs 160g and measures 12.2cm wide, 7.5cm tall and just 1.6cm thick. There's only one physical button on the device, namely the power button. A micro SD card slot sits on the left side, but with a whopping 4GB of internal storage – and only just over half used – it's unlikely you'll need to use it. Look carefully and you'll notice a mic on the left side, however with no Bluetooth or voice recognition functionality it's a totally redundant feature on the 1340T.
Start up times are quick, with the main menu appearing after just 20 seconds from cold and the satellite lock being obtained a few seconds later. Browsing the map, however, can be painfully slow - on occasion, we had to wait a good 10 seconds when scrolling around before the screen updated. We also experienced a couple of crashes – software-based, not multi-car pile ups – when browsing with the GPS receiver switched off. Thankfully, neither of these problems occurred during navigation.
The 1340T comes with street level road maps for Western Europe, courtesy of Navteq. Register your device with Garmin and, if a new map is released within 60-days of your first journey, you'll be able to download it for free. From then on, single map updates cost £73 or lifetime updates can be purchased for a one-off £100 payment.
If you enjoy having road names read out, the Nüvi 1340T will gladly oblige. Naturally, some road names are too complex for the text-to-speech engine to pronounce accurately, but it makes a decent fist of it and reads out roads such as the A259 in the correct "A-two-five-nine" manner as opposed to "A-two-hundred-and-fifty-nine".
Navigation commands are clear, but we did find the 'next turn' icon that appears in the top right of the screen a little small – especially when approaching roundabouts. It's able to belt out instructions loud enough to be heard over the roar of motorway driving, although it won't increase the volume automatically as you speed up. You also have to return to the main menu, in order to change the volume – as with so many other sat navs, simple physical volume buttons would be so much better.

Logitech Squeezebox music streamer:
the Squeezebox Duet, Boom and Radio models, the Touch is Logitech's latest wizard wheeze to help liberate your digital music files. Like the Duet, the Touch acts as a bridge between your PC and your hi-fi by hooking the two up using a Wi-Fi network. However, you can't use it as a stand alone music player, as you can with the Boom and the Radio.

The Touch resembles a small fat digital picture frame but one canted back at around 40 degrees to allow for convenient access to the capacitive 4.3in colour screen that houses the system UI. Like all the other Squeezebox kit I have tested, the Touch is well made, smart and practical. The rear stand is large and solid enough to let you poke the screen without fear of it toppling over, while the underside is rubberized to prevent it sliding about in use.
As well as being able to stream audio over a Wi-Fi network, the Touch includes an SD card reader built into the side along with a USB port at the back. Load either with JPEG images rather than music files - or both - and the Touch doubles up as a digital picture frame when the screen isn't doing UI duties. Other sockets include phono audio, 100Mb/s Ethernet, optical and digital audio outputs and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

As is usual with Logitech, using a Squeezebox device means first installing theSqueezecentre server software. Still, that's not much of a drawback because, as server software goes, its rather good and it works on PC, Mac and Linux machines, and most NAS boxes too. Once you have set up Squeezecentre, connected the Touch to your stereo and entered any wireless system security codes, you are good to go - it's as simple as that.

iPod Touch: 
 iPod Touch The original iPod Touch lacked email and applications (other than Web apps via its Mobile Safari browser), and it had other deficiencies, as well: no volume buttons, no speaker, no camera and no Bluetooth, although it featured WiFi networking, along with USB. As a media player, this iPod Touch was limited to 8 or 16 GB of storage vs. the iPod Classic's 80 or 160 GB capacity.

Today's second-generation iPod Touch improves a bit upon the original hardware, but it was the 2008 introduction of Apple's iTunes App Store that has turned the device into a full-fledged mobile computer with tens of thousands of third-party applications available.

To date, the iPod Touch is the only device other than the iPhone that works on Apple's mobile application platform. And that is the reason to buy one.
Platform

The iPod Touch uses the same operating system as the iPhone, which is a (massively) slimmed-down version of the "OS X" operating system used for Apple's Macintosh computers. The Mobile Safari browser is based on Apple's desktop Safari browser (though it doesn't support Flash content), but the user interface is completely different. The iPhone/iPod Touch UI is designed from the ground-up for fingers and small screens rather than the mice and relatively large screens of desktop and laptop computers, and every other phone vendor has been scrambling to catch up with it. [See our first iPod Touch review for more details about the underlying hardware platform and user interface, as well as our iPhone reviews, listed in the "Links" section below.]

In 2008, the year after the iPod Touch's debut, Apple rolled out "OS 2.0" for its mobile platform (dropping "X" from its name). Aside from some performance improvements and bug fixes, the real news was support for Apple's new iTunes App Store, which opened up a whole world of third-party apps, drastically expanding the usefulness of the device and justifying many more purchases.
In other words, iPod Touch is not a Walkman-like, single-purpose device. It is an evolving, general purpose computing platform that fits in the palm of your hand.
OS 3.0

iPhone OS 3.0 is due this summer. Like OS 2.0, it should run on all previous iPod Touch models, with an upgrade price of $9.95. Apple gave a public preview, focussing on features for developers but also showcasing new features for end users. Notable enhancements include MMS messaging (to support sending and receiving pictures, contacts, audio messages and map locations); voice memos; calendaring enhancements; cut-and-paste (like Mac OS X has); and a new Spotlight system for searching the iPod's contents (including third party app data, if the developer writes a plug-in).
Other anticipated features include WiFi auto-login, support for Stereo Bluetooth headphones, Notes sync, Safari anti-phishing security improvements and form auto-fill, improved parental controls, true YouTube login, and the ability to get movies and TV shows directly from Apple's store without having to use your Mac or PC to buy-and-sync them over iTunes.
Apple also promises a developers' interface to the Dock port in OS 3.0 for enabling custom hardware and software access — think audio recording, data acquisition, 3G cellular data or fax modems... and ultimately anything the homebrew hardware community can dream up! (A little keyboard, like the fold-up ones that used to be made for the Palm III and Palm V series, would be quite welcome.)
But, as we await OS 3.0, what does the second-generation iPod Touch have for you today?

NEW MP3 PLAYER:
Leading the pack is the Cowon S9, which pulled off 36 hours of music playback and a mind-boggling 11 hours of video during CNET Labs testing. For those with more refined tastes (and bigger wallets), the Sony X-Series Walkman offers stunning OLED picture quality, a capacitive touch-screen interface, exceptional audio quality, and an integrated pair of active noise-canceling headphones. It also goes the distance with 33 hours of audio playback and 9 hours of video.
The Samsung P3, Apple iPod Touch, and Microsoft Zune HD, all offer a great balance of audio and video battery life, averaging 30 to 40 hours of audio and 6 to 8 hours of video. If your needs (or budget) run more to the modest end of the spectrum, the Philips GoGear Spark is a great buy with 32 hours of battery (CNET Labs results) life and an ultracompact design.
MP3 players with the best battery life
Has the daily ritual of recharging all your portable devices become so loathsome that adding one more gadget to the list might just make you snap? Or maybe your extreme, jet-setting lifestyle requires a portable music player that can run for more than 30 hours without a recharge? Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve assembled this list of our favorite long-haul MP3 players, all of which are capable of a week’s worth of casual usage without a recharge.