The Logitech Zone Touch Mouse T400 is the latest entry in what promises to be a burgeoning (and lucrative) market: peripherals designed to make Windows 8 more user friendly. While the T400 is a good all-around mouse with a handsomely minimalist appearance, its low profile and somewhat basic gesture control functionality limit its potential.

The competitively priced Western Digital My Book Live Duo is a two-drive network attached storage (NAS) device that offers an astounding 4TB of storage capacity. It's very easy to use and offers speedy file read times, but it does lack some features and the latest USB 3.0 connectivity.

The HP Wi-Fi Touch Mouse X7000 performs a neat trick: It connects to your laptop or desktop not with a cable, a wireless dongle, or Bluetooth, but with Wi-Fi. It throws in an extra treat for social networking fanatics—a dedicated "post to Facebook" button—but it leaves plenty of other people out in the cold.

The Seagate GoFlex Turbo is an external hard drive that makes use of the fastest USB 3.0 connectivity, which is still rare these days. It has a rugged design and a solid selection of utilities to make using this drive as easy as possible. The only downside is the price, which is a little high for only 500GB of storage.

The LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt (240GB SSD) is currently the least expensive way to obtain Thunderbolt speeds for your late-model Mac. It's half the price of the Promise Pegasus R6, the only other Thunderbolt drive on the market, but that doesn't mean it's cheap.

The Logitech Couch Mouse M515 is exactly what its name suggests: a mouse to use while sitting on a couch, carpet or otherwise non-desk surface. It works well on most surface, especially fabric, and has very long battery life but it is a little heavier than we expected.

The Microsoft Touch Mouse combines a traditional mouse with multitouch gestures to make navigating and using Windows 7 on a desktop computer just like a notebook with a touchpad. While a little expensive, it is very responsive, comfortable to use and intuitive.

The Seagate GoFlex Slim (320GB) hard drive is like a prize greyhound, with a distinctive slim look and USB 3.0 speed. Some might want a drive with more storage capacity, but the sleek design and zippy speeds will tempt most buyers.

No matter how you look at it, the Canon REALiS SX80 Mark II business projector is anything but typical. It offers unusually advanced control over color, making it of particular interest to anyone who needs to get onscreen color just so.

The Buffalo CloudStor Pro (2TB) is an easy-to-setup networked attached storage (NAS) device that allows you to remotely access your files from any networked computer and from a remote location via computer or supported wireless device. It works quite well, but it does lack in security features and speed.