Acer

You see them on tables in coffee shops, under the arms of college students and on the laps of travelers waiting for a flight. Called "netbooks" or "mini-notebooks," these small, lightweight and relatively affordable computers are one of the hottest tech toys of the year.

Popularized by Asus Eee PCs, which start at $269, netbooks are designed for basic tasks -- Web surfing, e-mail and word processing. That's just fine for some folks.

Dell has rolled out a new mini-notebook PC in Japan that is slated to launch globally next month at a retail price of under $600.

Tipping the scales at 2.72 lbs and measuring just 0.92 inches thick, the Inspiron Mini 12 integrates Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) radios, 1GB of RAM, a 12.1-inch WXGA display, a built-in Webcam, and a 60GB or 80GB hard disk drive. In addition to Windows Vista Home Basic, users can elect to run Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux.

Computer makers are betting consumers want a product that's more than a smart phone but less than a full-featured laptop. Lenovo, the Chinese company with worldwide headquarters in Morrisville, N.C., is the latest to enter the burgeoning market for netbooks -- also known as Internet PCs. This month, Lenovo announced plans for a 1-inch-thick IdeaPad netbook with a 10-inch screen. Starting price: $399.

AMD's Puma is coming onto the stage. The new laptop platform from Advanced Micro Devices, with AMD's dual-core Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor, a seven-series chip set, and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics, was to be unveiled Wednesday at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan.

Hoping to create a new benchmark for PC gaming, Advanced Micro Devices announced its AMD Game logo on Monday. The company said the AMD Game logo is "designed to help consumers select perfectly suited PCs for high-definition gaming."

A PC platform with an AMD Game logo will have what AMD called a "powerful balance" of multi-core processors, high-definition digital media, and high-powered graphics processing.

As Simple as Buying a Video-Game Console