There's a distinct split between the straightforward storage-and-apps model, and the more ambitious desktop-in-a-browser paradigm. Of the latter we felt that Ajax Windows was frankly unusable. Edesk and Glide did somewhat better, but were still buggy, complicated and overcrammed with gimmicks and Edesk, like Ajax Windows, had too many icons that were just links to other sites, rather than an integral part of the desktop.

Despite its modest capabilities and lack of a presentation program, we felt that Peepel did the desktop best. It is elegantly and originally designed and very easy to learn. We hope to see it develop further but for now it takes our first Recommended award.

Of the less ambitious storage-and-apps trio, the choice is more difficult. The sheer clout of Google is going to attract many and if you're an existing Gmail or Picasa user, then it acts as a portal to these, too. It handles collaboration well and, despite being a minority interest, the Forms module is an excellent way of creating and sending questionnaires and analysing the results.

Zoho's applications outperform Google's in terms of features, especially in the spreadsheet where it's the only contender to support VBA and one of the two that offer pivot tables. For those who find this important - and we do - it's also better looking. We particularly liked the way the file manager tucked in to the left of each application. The wiki creation and the shared Notebook may also be useful to some, and the Word and Excel plug-ins offer much better offline access than the grinding of Go ogle Gears, and so it too wins a Recommended award.