A buyer's guide to the top 10 must-have gadgets

While most of us have laptops with optical drives these days, more and more of us carry around netbooks or even just our smartphones - so maybe it's time for the portable DVD player to make a comeback.

We think this Sony is a contender, even if at 200 it is one of the steeper prices for a DVD player. The high resolution nine-inch LCD screen is great quality and can be twisted it to the right position for best viewing.

Sony DVP-FX930 Portable DVD Player

Magic Mouse Price: 50

Mac users tend to adore their computers no matter what, but one thing that has regularly come up as a downside to the sleek machines is its mouse - they often stick, are unresponsive or are just not very tactile.

Steve Jobs and his team have come up with an answer to this with the beautifully crafted Magic Mouse. It gives the user all the multi-touch abilities of an iPhone and makes both work and play easier on your Mac device.

Apple Magic Mouse

Powermat

How can a charger be exciting? A new breed of chargers has been coming out of the woodwork in the past few months meaning that rather than having one plug and one input for each mobile, MP3 or other device, you can now have a charging pad, allowing you to power up multiple devices at the same time from one socket.

One of the latest of this breed is the Powermat. It is a wireless charging tool compatible with BlackBerry, iPhone, iPod and Nintendo DS Lite and DSi handsets.

Powermat

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.