Apple CEO Steve Jobs is no stranger to superlatives. Every product Apple makes is "insanely great," "amazing," or even "magical." So when he unveiled the latest MacBook Air models, declaring them to be the "future of notebooks," it was easy to dismiss his claims as nothing more than the usual Apple marketing. After spending some quality time with an 11" MacBook Air, however, it's hard not to hope he's right. The new MacBook Air is a great package, but there is one glaring weakness in it that will keep many potential buyers away: the CPU.

When the new machine's hardware specs were announced, we had concerns about its performance given Apple's decision to stick with older Core 2 Duo processors—let's face it, a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo is laughably behind the performance curve of current mobile processors from Intel. Given the tiny space inside the 11" MacBook Air's case, Apple chose slower ultra-low voltage processors, and, as you'll see in our benchmarks, this decision has a real impact. Though we can appreciate the design tradeoffs, that doesn't mean we're necessarily ready to accept subpar performance. We also wanted to know if Apple's battery life claims would prove accurate under use outside of a laboratory.

We already answered a number of your specific questions about the 11" MacBook Air last week. Read on to find out more of what we learned after putting it through its paces in real-world settings.

The iPad made up 95 percent of the global tablet market during the third quarter of 2010, according to analysts at Strategy Analytics, though that will change as more players get into the market. The firm said that the tablet space grew to 4.4 million tablets between July and September, thanks in large part to Apple's 4.19 million iPads sold during the quarter.

Android tablets made up 2.3 percent of the remaining chunk of the market (down from 2.9 percent), though Strategy Analytics expects that to increase soon as more Android-based products enter the market. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, for example, will go on sale in the US later this month, which will give a serious boost Android's tablet numbers as would-be tablet buyers look for an alternative to the iPad. The numbers will likely shift again when the RIM PlayBook makes its debut in 2011, too.

It's likely that Android's growth in the tablet market will follow a similar pattern to its smartphone growth. The flood of Android phones into the market has given users a wide range of options when compared against Apple's and RIM's limited selection. This strategy has benefitted Android due to its sheer number of devices.

Apple definitely has the first-mover advantage when it comes to tablets, and that counts for something. "The tablet wars are up and running," Strategy Analytics analyst Niel Mawston said in a statement. "Apple has quickly leveraged its famous brand, an extensive retail presence and user-friendly design to develop the tablet segment into a multi-billion-dollar global business."

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I'm in San Francisco this week for Qt Developer Days, a conference devoted to the cross-platform Qt software development toolkit. The event has attracted an impressively diverse group of hardware vendors who use Qt on devices ranging from public transportation ticketing systems to medical equipment. Among the devices that are on display in the event's exhibition hall is a WeTab tablet.

WeTab, which was developed by the German hardware vendor Neofonie, is an Atom-powered tablet computer that ships with the Linux-based MeeGo operating system. It has an 11-inch multitouch display, embedded Intel graphics, and a front-facing 1.3MP camera. I spent some hands-on time with the device to see how its custom MeeGo environment stacks up against Android and iOS.

The WeTab home screen is a scrollable field with embedded HTML widgets and application launchers. The bundled software stack is a mix of conventional Linux applications, including the OpenOffice.org office suite, Adobe Acrobat Reader, a terminal emulator, and the FBReader e-book application. Following Apple's lead, the version of FBReader that ships with the WeTab has been skinned so that the interface looks like a book with pages. The rest of the Linux software appears to be largely unmodified. The device comes with its own built-in app store, which allows you to install additional software and home screen widgets from a repository. The store is a bit sparse at the moment, however.

The WeTab user interface shell has a sidebar on the right that provides access to an Exposé-style window switcher, the home screen, and the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard is also activated automatically when the user taps a text entry widget. The on-screen keyboard is mediocre and wasn't particularly easy to type on.

Unlike Android and iOS, the WeTab software environment uses a conventional window manager that allows the user to resize windows, drag them around the screen, and view multiple overlapping windows at the same time. Due to this capability and the performance characteristics of the device's Atom processor, the WeTab software experience feels more like a netbook than a tablet. It has a lot of rough edges and doesn't come with much out of the box, but it's very open and quite conducive to running ported desktop Linux applications, which could make it appealing to enthusiasts who are looking for a more flexible device than the iPad or Android-based tablets.

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Peter Bright spent the last few weeks lamenting the fact that he couldn't show some of the nicer touches in Windows Phone 7, because most of them involved subtle animations and movement. After playing with the OS for a few hours, I started to understand why he was upset.

Here's a quick look at the process of text messaging on one of these devices. You'll see small animations here and there, the general fluidity of the phone, and some epic man hands in the following video.

During a stint in California, I once wandered into a ramshackle San Diego bookstore and began browsing the back shelves in search of dusty treasures. After some time, the owner—who appeared to be an aging hippie—popped up at my side like an apparition, giving me a terrific start. He talked at me about his store. "I don't sell books," he said, leaning uncomfortably close. "I smell books." To prove his point, he took a volume off the shelf, pulled it to his nostrils, and inhaled deeply, lovingly, bibliophilically—the book as bong hit.

"You try."

He shoved the book at me; I rocked politely forward, took my polite whiff, and politely agreed that it smelled wonderfully bookish.

Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC's GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

Many of our readers are already quite familiar with VLC—the software is available for many platforms as open source through the GPLv2. VLC is promoted and managed by the nonprofit association VideoLAN, and the code itself is constantly being developed and improved by hundreds of programmers around the world. So, how did the VLC iOS app get into this mess, and what's really going on?

Android's market share has continued its rise in the third quarter of the year and Apple's iOS and RIM are struggling to keep up. According to NPD's Mobile Phone Track, Android was installed on 44 percent of all smartphones sold during the third quarter, up from 33 percent in the second quarter, while iOS saw a slight bump from 22 to 23 percent and RIM dropped into third place at 22 percent.

Looking at the quarter-to-quarter and year-over-year changes, it's apparent that Android is gobbling up BlackBerry users, rather than the iOS ones so frequently targeted by Android-related ad campaigns. BlackBerry held 28 percent of the market only a few months ago in the second quarter, and its loss of six percentage points in Q3 appears to have contributed to Android's 11-point gain.

Android has benefited from the introduction of a bunch of new handsets, including the EVO 4G, Droid X, and Droid 2, while BlackBerry's only high-profile release was the BlackBerry Torch. Android phones are also being sold by carriers that were previously BlackBerry-dominated, a trend likely contributing to the swing in market share.

Because Android is spread out over so many handsets, no single Android phone has yet to crack the top three in individual handset sales. The iPhone 4 dominated the sales rankings, followed by the BlackBerry Curve 8850 and the LG Cosmos. The Droix X and EVO 4G placed fourth and fifth, respectively.

Compared to the third quarter of 2009, RIM appears to be in a serious backslide: its market share has declined by 53 percent since then. Likewise, Apple's iOS share has declined by 21 percent since Q3 2009. Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD, notes that even though Apple appears to have emerged from third quarter unscathed, it will face "challenges in further expanding its domestic market share" as long as it's obligated to be exclusive with AT&T.

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