At first glance, you might mistake the Dell Latitude E4300 for an earlier-vintage laptop: Its sharp lines and subtle finish stick out in today’s world of glossy gadgets with rounded corners. That’s not to say the E4300 isn’t a handsome portable, however–it did grow on me. Even better, the matte finish isn’t a magnet for fingerprints, dust, and smudges like every iPhone-inspired design on the market. If you don’t care about hip style trends that come and go, the vaguely retro E4300 is a pretty sweet all-purpose laptop that can serve you well for general office computing.

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Microsoft is looking into battery problems apparently affecting Windows 7 notebooks amid complaints from some users that the OS has crippled their batteries.

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Google’s Gmail service offers vast amounts of storage, a unique approach to organization, one of the best e-mail-searching features around, and access to all your e-mail from any Web browser–all for the low, low price of free. And with a program such as Mailplane, you can even get many (though not all) of the niceties of a dedicated e-mail client.

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The whole point of a CRM system is to improve revenue productivity and the quality of customer interaction. That means measurement. So why shouldn’t measurement look beyond output and examine the activities that contribute to revenue, closed cases, and happy customers?

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A few years ago I brought my MacBook into an Apple Store to get it serviced–this was a first-generation model, which had the rather unenviable habit of spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason.

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A Chinese company that sells a tablet PC like Apple’s newly announced iPad may sue the U.S. company over the similar design between the devices, it said Monday.

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[The following is excerpted with permission from the blog of independent software developer Fraser Speirs' blog at speirs.org.]

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Intel and Micron plan to unveil new 25-nanometer flash memory chips on Monday via their IM Flash Technologies joint venture, the first commercial chip products made using advanced 25nm manufacturing technology.

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While it seemed that all eyes were on Apple’s unveiling of the long-awaited iPad this week, Oracle on the same day revealed its plans for Sun Microsystems’ technology, while those at Sun braced for the merger and began their public goodbyes. We also had a flurry of financial reports this week and some Internet weirdness associated with President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address.

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I love my Kindle 2, but we’re not exclusive or anything. So I certainly intend to buy an iPad–especially since it’s a lot more than an e-book reader. While Steve Jobs’s preview of the iBooks app did reveal a stunning reading interface, it also raised some questions for me about whether the iPad can truly compete as an e-reader.

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