Android Phone

£69.99; onlive.co.uk

It's true that it gives Mac users access to games about which, hitherto, they've only been able to dream - such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, BioShock, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Borderlands - and the same applies to the tablets, although they remain hamstrung by their familiar control-system issues.

It has some tricks up its sleeve, too. You can use it to jump straight into multiplayer games like Homefront, and you can spectate on games being played by anyone on the system. Plus you can record clips of your finest moves, and upload them straight to Facebook.

The enabling technology behind OnLive converts the graphics of games running on the system's servers to video, which it streams to you without having to go anywhere near a graphics processor. But that strength is also a weakness in one crucial respect: the quality of the visuals it provides is entirely dependent on the speed of your broadband.

If visual aesthetics are a concern, and you don't have access to the fastest broadband available in this country, OnLive probably isn't for you.

And when super-fast broadband becomes widely available, it will become a much more attractive proposition. OnLive isn't the future yet - but it will be one day.