New toys for boys and girls

Gadgets:Here's a round-up of the cool gadgets in the last year that have caught our eye.

Cells are rechargeable AA batteries that can be charged from any USB port on a PC. They work exactly like any other rechargeable AA battery, just without the charger - handy if you have a wireless mouse that needs AA batteries to work. They are 90 per cent charged after five hours by powered USB, though you can also use a normal charger.

The Nintendo DS Lite (from about €140) is a handy, newer version of the original DS hand-held gaming console. Handy because it's thinner and lighter than the original, which is great for storage and pocket ability. WiFi allows players to interact with each other online or in the office.

If the real pet you bought for Christmas is suddenly looking like a bad idea, you may like to consider the Pleo, the baby robotic dinosaur (€350) which is jammed with features, including pressure sensors under its skin, infrared in its head, force-feedback sensors in its toes and 14 servo motors.

The Pleo's makers say it can express joy and aggression, yawn, sigh, sniff, sniffle, snore and sneeze.

The Archos 605 WiFi portable media player (from €190), has a 4.3" touchscreen and can download movies, TV and music from the web. It will also record and play back videos, photos or store up to 40 movies, 300,000 photos or 15,000 songs on its 30GB hard drive.

One of the most exciting launches this year was the Asus Eee PC, sold in Europe as the MiniBook at about €240. Without a hard drive everything is stored in 4GB solid-state memory, giving it a great battery life.

Running on free operating system Linux means its cheaper and very quick to use, especially for writing on the go. It also has WiFi, a web browser and Office applications. Yes, the keyboard is tiny, but it's great for kids.

Roaming around the house wirelessly surfing the web with Nokia's new electronic organiser is fun. The N810 has built-in maps integrated with GPS.

Previous incarnations were bulky, but this is thinner and sports a slide-out keyboard and longer battery life. Sure, you can surf the web on your iPod Touch as well, but it won't do Skype calls, as the N810 will out of the box. It has a four-inch screen, 2GB storage, Bluetooth, camera and also plays video and music.

q Nintendo's Wii (about €320) has now outstripped sales of Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3. Not bad when you consider that, when it was launched, journalists openly sniggered at the name.

Its appeal has been simple: mass-market games and the amazing controller which has people up out of their seats and virtually dancing as they play.

This has been the stand-out games console of the year and should stay that way in 2008.

The Linx Ality digital photo frame (about €186) is more affordable than many digital frames. The eight-inch model has all the standard features and also has an internal battery so you can walk around with it. It has 512MB built-in memory or takes an inserted SD memory card.

The Olympus SP-550 UZ (from €440), the world's first camera with an 18x optical zoom, has 23 scene modes as well as full manual mode.

But the 18x zoom is really the big draw, pulling focus from the equivalent of 28mm through to 504mm - an amazing range for a camera half the size of the average digital SLR.