PCW reported a few weeks back that Packard Bell is being pitched as the "style brand" of new owner Acer. Packard Bell makes worthy and effective machines but I had to confess that we had never seen it as a trendy brand.

But it was showing off its new range yesterday and the little aluminium-and-white EasyNote BG48 pictured above did catch the eye. It is marked Limited Edition, though no-one at the launch seemed to know whether three or three million will be available. It looks good and
the spec is not bad either: a 12.1in screen, a Core 2 processor, a four-in-one card reader, and a 1.3 megapixel camera. Prices start at just £299, and it is sold through PC World.

There are 13in and 17in versions too. Apparently there have been previous Limited Editons, so perhaps I have been missing something.

At the other end of Packard Bell's notobebook scale (and style) is its iPowerGX gaming notebook, running a quad-core Intel Q9100. It has a 17in HD-capable 1920x1200 display driven by Nvidia's GeForce 9800M GTS, with 1GB of GDDR3 VRAM. It will be available from January, with prices staring at £999.

A sister product for the desktop is the  iPower X2.0 (above right), styled for the gamer and designed for easy modding. You get a choice of a Core 2 Quad or a Core 2 Extreme processor and up to 3TB of storage. It's available from the end of this month, priced from £1299.