Belkin CushTop Notebook platform Steel, Burnt orange

My boyfriend bought me this rather mysterious looking object for my birthday, knowing how much time I spend cosied up in bed on Facebook and Ciao - he was worried I was going to overheat the laptop and set the bed alight one of these days!

The Belkin CushTop is, according to the packaging, "uniquely designed for comfortable laptop use on the couch, bed or floor". It is a sort of asymmetrical traezium shape made from what feels like that tightly-packed polystyrene stuff that is used as packing for electrical items and the like, slightly padded and covered in a hard-wearing fabric.

It is taller at one end than at the other so that your laptop is slightly angled, enabling you to see what keys you're pressing more easily when it's on your lap (for the non-touch-typers among us!), and one surface is much wider than the other, so it is suitable for both 15" and 17" laptops - just flip it over. Simple but ingenious!

The other simple-but-ingenious idea is the 'hole' - the CushTop is hollow in the middle, thus creating a handy storage area not only for the power lead as the packaging suggests, but also for all sorts of computer paraphenalia - external hard drives, CDs, mouse, camera whilst you download photos, MP3 player, biscuits... the list is endless.

The main purpose of the CushTop is to ensure that both the laptop and user do not overheat and it fulfills this purpose impeccably. I'd been faffing about on the internet for an hour or two before I started this review, and altthough my legs are pretty warm, if I hadn't had the CushTop I would have had to take the laptop off my lap by now. Lifting the laptop up, the CushTop feels warm, but again, nothing like it would have been had it been sitting directly on my legs. The other advantage I find with this product is that the fabric covering provides a non-slip element, meaning that I can move about (reach for things, etc) and my laptop stays put on the CushTop, when otherwise it might slide off my lap.

The only bad point I can see with this prodct is that it is rather large and cumbersome, and does not break down to a smaller size for storage, but this is a minor niggle. Overall this product is a brilliant idea which has been innovatively designed.

The Belkin CushTop comes in four different colour combinations and retails from under £10 on the internet.

www.belkin.com/uk/