Aspire One netbooks already running Moblin were on display at the news conference

Court delays British hacker's extradition to U.S.: Gary McKinnon's extradition to the U.S. was delayed by the European Court of Human Rights, whose ruling allows him to stay in the U.K. at least until the court reconvenes on Aug. 28 and can further consider his case. U.S. prosecutors have charged McKinnon, who lives in London, with hacking into U.S. military networks, knocking 2,000 computers offline and deleting 2,455 user accounts as well as logs related to tracking Navy vessels. He has been fighting extradition, saying he was bullied by U.S. authorities into confessing in exchange for a lesser sentence.

Later this year, In Technology will release a version that supports the China-developed 3G mobile standard that the country is currently trying to promote, TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access).

The company declined to give details of the computer's microprocessor, which it called the "AMD Super Mobile," or how it will make phone calls from Windows XP.

Apple's MacBook Air is 4mm thick at its thinnest point and 19mm at its thickest, by comparison.

The X-Slim 340 comes with a 4-cell HP DV6000 battery as standard and the potential for 7-hours of run time, according to MSI. An 8-cell battery is also available.

More people have been added to the project to reduce the delays, he said, declining to give further details. Sony Ericsson is working closely with its manufacturing partner HTC, he said.

Plans to sell the Xperia X1 in other countries won't be affected by the delays, despite the initial shortage of phones, according to Brusewitz.

The new Kindle is a minuscule 0.36-inches thick, nearly half the depth of the original model. It's also shed nearly two pounds, weighing in at 10.2 ounces. While it's still another device to tote along in your laptop bag, the Kindle 2 is easily smaller than the pile of books it displaces. We'll have to wait for real-world testing to gauge the Dell1691P battery life, but Amazon claims it'll go up to four days in regular use. And unlike the original, you don't need a separate power adapter to charge the Kindle 2; just tap into a USB port.

Netbooks meet a need. Smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, are intended for what DisplaySearch analyst John Jacobs calls a three-minute experience--enough time to check e-mail or call the office. A notebook is for longer sessions, maybe three hours. A netbook fits in between. It's designed for a 30-minute experience including Web access, e-mail and document editing. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, says netbooks are travel-friendly, fit well with enterprise hot-swap repair procedures (since they are easy to manage) and thus can work for both IT managers and mobile professionals such as sales agents.

Microsoft executives, such as Robbie Bach, speaking at the International CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas in April 2009, are going out of their way to demonstrate Windows 7 running on netbooks. Bach was promoting Windows 7 on netbooks at the conference because many netbooks, such as the high-end HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition, include built-in support for 3G networks. This promotion of the low-cost computers as a platform for Windows 7 raises the question: just how good is the experience of running Windows 7 on a netbook?

Aspire One netbooks already running Moblin were on display at the news conference. Moblin was developed for netbooks, which are mini-laptops built for mobility with low-power microprocessors, 10-inch screens and six-cell HP 2710P battery for long run times. An updated version of the operating system, Moblin 2.0, was released last month, and it has proven popular at Computex Taipei 2009.

A number of netbooks were on display at the news conference, running several different versions of Moblin on various netbooks, including Suse Moblin, Xandros Moblin, Linpus Moblin, Red Flag Moblin and Ubuntu Moblin running on netbooks from Hewlett-Packard, Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International and Hasee Computer.

Still, because of their razor-thin profiles, these are the executive status symbols of our time. When you're carrying a beauty like the Apple MacBook Air, the Dell Adamo, or the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, those making due with a lesser model can only look up with PC envy.