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Azentek yesterday launched the world's first fully integrated in-car PC into the Australian market.

The stock market's a mess, your company's balance sheet looks like a sea of red ink and your budget for outfitting 50 employees with new notebooks has been slashed to the bone. What's a poor buyer to do?

Whenever Apple releases newly designed products -- meaning hardware offering more than just a speed bump -- the greater question is, "What does it mean?" That is, are the new features mere anomalies, or are they something truly new that will set the shape, material and design of the future?

The original Asus Eee PC took the hardware world by storm. Small, lightweight, inexpensive, yet running a full-fledged OS, this tiny device offered laptop capabilities at near-PDA pricing. Asus has since expanded its Eee PC line with models of varying capabilities, and competing devices are now arriving from other manufacturers, including Acer, Dell, HP, and MSI, among others. Collectively, these devices have come to be called "netbooks."

I'm often cautious of devices that claim to have Wi-Fi functionality and support, mainly because connecting to Wi-Fi (especially secure Wi-Fi) can be tricky for devices that don't utilize a browser or some other good input method. In the past, several devices I've tried (digital photo frames, cameras, printers) have failed to connect to my network because of the configuration issues required that weren't completely hammered out by the vendor.

Web-based applications and products like Apple's iTunes have made it easy to turn a laptop or a desktop into a music player. At the same time, thousands of radio stations are re-broadcasting their audio over the Internet to anyone who wants to listen. But what if you want to listen to, say, modern jazz from Mali or pop from Paris without dragging around a laptop? Enter the Internet radio: an appliance that looks like a radio and has an antenna -- but connects over Wi-Fi to the Internet, and streams audio to speakers.

Hewlett-Packard's 2133 Mini-Note may end up as the premium choice among the entire mini-laptop, or netbook, category of devices announced so far.

It often takes high-tech vendors three tries to get a product right. Microsoft is the best example of this rule of three. (Think of how buggy and insecure Windows XP was until 1Service Pack 2 came out. Upstart mini-laptop maker Asustek Computer, it turns out, is another.

There are enough smartphone choices to make you dizzy. Yet in the business world, it arguably comes down to RIM's BlackBerry and select Windows Mobile-based devices -- with the strong possibility of Apple's 3G iPhone stealing some of their thunder.

Taiwan's Asustek Computer (Asus), the leader of the mini-notebook category due to its early launch of the Eee PC, launched two new models of the family last month, the 901 and 1000, the first Eee PCs that use Intel's Atom microprocessor.

For enterprises wanting to roll out SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on notebooks, the lack of 3G, or UMTS, wireless broadband card support was an annoying hole compared to the available Windows support.