The computers have a seven-inch screen, Windows CE, built-in Wi-Fi, two gigabytes of storage, an ethernet port, two USB ports, a camera card slot and an AC adapter. You can find them at bit.ly/37lap. (If they’re still there.)

Every year, the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” sponsors a conference where CEOs from tech companies speak. They’ve just posted videos from the conference at video.allthingsd.com/

Movie director James Cameron spoke with Journal reporters about the making of the Titanic in 3D. So did the heads of Microsoft, AOL, eBay, HTC, Dreamworks, and  several other companies.

Videos of product demos at D8,  such as Dell’s new tablet, the Streak and Microsoft’s “Project Natal” can be seen at d8.allthingsd.com. Full coverage from past conferences is found at allthingsd.com/d.

We like Eee notebooks, so the Eee Pad should be a winner. The computer is expected to weigh a pound and a half, and be about the size of a magazine. Unlike the iPad, the Eee Pad will have Windows 7 and will cost $399 to $449– $50 to $100 less than the basic iPad.

Will people want Windows 7 on their Eee pad? On the iPad, you don’t have Windows maintenance tasks, anti-virus programs, Control Panel, etc. We use the iPad for relaxation –streaming movies from Netflix, watching news videos, listening to NPR, tapping the Yahoo Entertainment App for book reviews, weird stories of the day and reading blogs. Two million iPads have been sold.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the 10-inch and 12-inch models of the new Eee Pad will come with their own docking station that can be connected to a physical keyboard. This makes a lot of sense to us. We just bought something similar for our iPad. Apple also sells a wireless keyboard, but it has no shelf for the tablet.

Asustek is also planning to sell an e-reader, called the Eee Tablet,  available in September for $199 to $299. It will have a two-megapixel camera, an electronic notepad, a media player and a battery life of 10 hours. It will have its own app store, and will be compatible with Adobe Flash. More info here and here.

After installing the software on two laptops, a desktop and a miniature computer called an “ultraportable,” we inserted the flash drive on one and immediately saw links to all the others. Now, we can be anywhere and use the programs back home. The bad news is we can no longer pretend we’re on a vacation trip and are out of touch with our equipment; the good news is we don’t have to travel with a laptop (they’re heavy).

There’s a free version of LogMeIn at logmein.com. LogMeIn Ignition costs $40, and it’s a bit handier, because you don’t have to type in a user name and password for each computer, tablet or phone you want to control. Your passwords are encrypted and you just click.

By the way, we can’t recommend the tiny Windows XP computer we used to test LogMeIn. It’s called the Umid “Mbook BZ,” and it’s just a little bigger than a wallet. It looks great and worked fine with LogMeIn but the screen is so tiny we could barely read it. The keyboard matched that. Joy’s typing slowed from about 100 words per minute to ten. She had to enlarge the font in Word documents just to be able to see the words. Of course that meant there were fewer words to each displayed page. Bob’s son, however, loves the Mbook. He says it’s just right when you need to work standing up in a crowded room, and it fits in his pocket. It has a built-in webcam, so with Skype or some similar Internet phone service, you can use it as a video phone. It also connects to a projector. You can get a Umid Mbook BZ at dynamism.com for $549. Not cheap.

We love our desktop computers, which are comfortable and powerful, and our little laptops  that can be plugged into a TV when we want to surf the web or play games on the big screen. Why do we need a giant iPhone without the phone?  It  has only a virtual keyboard, no USB ports, no GPS, no webcam, no browser tabs, no multi-tasking, yada yada yada.

It’s not a Kindle killer. It’s more expensive than  Amazon’s popular e-reader, and a lot heavier. Where the Kindle weighs 10 ounces, the iPad is a pound and a half. You need two hands to hold it.

For Joy, who is a rabid multi-tasker, the iPad is a no-go. She typically has four or five programs open at once, something you can’t do on the iPad. You can queue up several apps at once for download. You’ll see one downloading and the others say “waiting.” But if you switch to web browsing, you can’t look at more than one site at once, say to listen to Pandora music while you surf the web. You can however, listen to your iTunes collection and surf.

We don’t need to carry one more thing around. When we’re home, it’s just as easy to use our desktop or laptop with a wireless connection to the Internet. We’d take the iPad to our apartment gym to use on the stairmaster, except that there’s no Wi-Fi. We could connect with 3G instead, but the 3G/Wi-Fi  iPads won’t be out for a month, and we’d have to pay extra, unlike on the Kindle, where 3G is free.

SO WE BOUGHT ONE ANYWAY

By 4 pm. the crowds were thinning at the Apple store. After three tries, Joy got her hands on one of the test machines. They were cabled to a table and she had to elbow in. The most enthusiastic users were kids. They were playing a Simpson game where Homer fights passersby. Adults were doing boring things like word processing, though we did see one guy building his dream house.

Joy started playing with it. And playing with it. And playing with it. She watched a Milton Friedman video. She looked at recipes. She played with the “iBook” app, and saw the pages flip as in a real book, with full-color illustrations. She surfed the web, listened to music, looked at movie trailers. Bob stayed outside to enjoy the Spring sunshine and get away from the computer which for him is on 24 hours a day, every day.

The amazing thing was how fast it all was. No booting up. It’s immediately on. Tap an app and it launched. The Wall Street Journal app, tailored just for the iPad, is fantastic. It looks like a real newspaper in digital form. When you tap it to open, you can go immediately to saved articles, your “watch list” of stocks, saved sections,  a current or past edition. You can read offline. The New York Times has a full-screen “Editor’s Choice” iPad app that gives you the top news and business stories. The Zinio Reader app shows magazines.

Battery life is fantastic. You can use it for more than 11 hours before it needs a recharge. Since it has no hard drive, videos don’t consume any more power than other activities.

So the third time Joy came out of the Apple store, Bob said “Get one.” And so we did.

We played with it most of the evening, listening to NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” We installed the Skype app and sent a few chats off. (We don’t usually use a webcam when we make Skype calls anyway, so this isn’t missed.) Joy enjoyed reading it in bed with the lights off, something she can’t do with the Kindle, which isn’t back-lit. She got up early this morning to install the ABC-TV player, and watched part of an “Ugly Betty” episode. Using the apps led her to things on the web that she never would have seen otherwise. By the way, “install” just means point to something. Everything is automatic.

Doing stuff on the iPad, whether work or play, feels like a break from the computer. It’s a completely different device.

THE JURY IS STILL OUT

Still, this is an expensive toy. It’s basically a giant iPhone or iPod Touch. We may still return it and go back to our laptops, which in a way, are slower iPads in clamshells.

There are 150,000 iPhone apps and over 3,000 iPad apps as of today (20 percent are free). You can view iPhone apps on the iPad, but they either take up a tiny window in the center of the screen, or they fill the screen, as Skype does, and the text is pixelated.

Email works fine, unless you prefer Microsoft Outlook. We tried it with Gmail. You can point to a folder on the left and the message pops right in. Or touch the tiny trash can to delete.

Whether you should get an iPad depends a lot on how you feel about touch screens. With a touch screen instead of a mouse, the computer seems a lot more fun.

It’s so  easy that babies can use it. Still, we were glad we tried it in the store first, because some things are not immediately obvious, like how to go back to the home screen. We finally found the online manual when we looked at the default bookmarks in the Safari web browser.

Prices start at $499 for 16 gigabytes. Add $100 for 32 gigabytes. Add $39 more for a case. Add more for a camera card adapter, if you don’t want to have to sync your photo collection from your computer. Perhaps it’s better to wait until more apps are out and further reviews are in.

Toshiba Mini NB305-N410BL 10.1-Inch Royal Blue Netbook - 11 Hours of Battery Life

Boy,  is this a common question. If you are used to Windows computers, you probably want to stay with Windows.

If you do a lot of video or photo editing, get a computer with a “Dual Core” processor, and avoid the “Atom”  processor found on netbooks, which really slows things down.

It’s nice to have three gigabytes of memory (RAM.) This will make your computer run fast, as long as you keep it free of viruses and spyware. (We do that with Avast anti-virus and “Anti-Malware” from Malware Bytes.) But it’s probably not necessary if you use the computer only for email, word processing, financial records and photo storage.

We have had excellent results with HP, which owns Compaq. We also like ASUS, Sony and Toshiba.

Desktops versus laptops:

You can get a great desktop for about $400. Here’s a link to a Compaq Presario CQ5320F. It has a huge hard drive, great memory, etc.: http://bit.ly/am917J

You can get an ASUS laptop for about the same price. http://bit.ly/9uBcb2. It has an atom processor, but that’s probably fine if all you do is email, word processing, and light photo editing.

Joy is really happy with Windows 7, which  comes on all the new computers. Programs start faster because you can “pin” an icon for them to your taskbar, which remains visible no matter how many windows you have open. You can also hover over an icon to see the documents you have open within that program. Click the “x” in the corner to close a document while it’s still in preview mode.

Monitor

We haven’t been as happy with the so-called “all in one” desktop. The nice thing about buying the tower separately is that you can still use the same monitor, even when you replace the tower.

Apple computers are a bit more expensive but have great customer support. We don’t find them any easier to use than Windows, but you’re less likely to get spyware and viruses; hackers typically go after Windows machines because they’re more common.

Retrevo.com does a good job of summarizing pricing options and reviews.

• 3D computers: You can get a 3D laptop from Acer for only $70 more than their standard $700 laptop. Before you say “gee whiz,” co-columnist Bob Schwabach first saw 3D computers at Argonne National Laboratory 35 years ago. Those cost a few hundred thousand dollars of course, and were the size of a dorm refrigerator. The Acer 5738 DG is mainly for gamers, and you have to look at the screen at a 120 degree angle or it’s blurry.
• Spotify is a new music site that comes to the U.S. later this year. Why is it so talked about? It appears to have all the features of Pandora, LastFM, Slacker and Jango in one, and then some. You can make 10,000-song playlists, choose radio “stations” based on a single artist or composer, etc.
• 

  Making an Alice in Wonderland poster from your photo

  Fiverr.com -hire yourself out or hire someone else for $5 a job. Someone is offering to make a personalized work of art from your photo. Another wants to make you an Alice in Wonderland poster. There’s also a translator from English to Finnish. And hundreds more.

• DocVerse: a universe where you can share Microsoft Office docs online.Google just bought it. It’s more convenient than Google docs, if you have Word and Excel documents you want others to collaborate on.
• Tawkon is a would-be iPhone app that Apple hasn’t approved yet. It tells you how much radiation is being emitted from your iPhone. But you don’t need this app if you remember a couple of things. Don’t hold your cell phone too tightly; a headset is better. The harder your cell phone has to work to keep a connection going, the more radiation it emits. So don’t try to call from an elevator or a restroom deep inside a building.
• Google Chrome, the web browser, already has about half as many add-ons or extensions (around 3,000) as Firefox does (6,000). That’s because developers don’t have to get them approved first, unless they do things like share the content’s of a user’s computer. Take a look here.
• adrive.com Free 50 gigabytes of online storage. Hard to beat that.

The “Litl” webbook is more like a TV than a computer. It has channels and a remote control; it’s close to maintenance-free. On the Litl, everything exists in the “cloud,” another term for the Internet. As long as you have wireless access, it connects automatically, and everything you do takes place there.

Unlike the new Apple iPad, the Litl has support for Adobe Flash, which is necessary if you want to watch videos or play games at sites like Hulu, Webkinz, ESPN, Miniclips, TVGorge and YouTube.  It has a 178-degree viewing angle, which is great if you do exercises on the floor while watching movies.

The latest Litl channel is an all-new recipe station for cooking, powered by BakeSpace.com. It brings 50,000 member-tested recipes into the kitchen.  Put the computer in “easel mode,” to make it even more TV-like. Sitting on the counter, the Litl can help with recipes, photos, music, videos, the news/weather, and an egg timer. It’s getting a “litl” hard to get; the $699 webbook is on backorder at litl.com.

According to an October report from the Yankee Group, at least 33 percent of netbooks are returned to the store. They’re light, sure, but their keyboards are cramped and their power is low.

How about the new Apple iPad? It has a lot of fans already, though most admit that it’s more a tool for watching movies, reading books or news than a vehicle for creating things.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos argues that the Kindle still makes sense as a dedicated reading device. The iPad weighs 1.5 pounds, the Kindle is just 10.3 ounces. You can lie back and hold it aloft in one hand. Kindle’s “e-Ink” is easier on your eyes than the iPad’s LCD screen. And there’s the price: $259 compared to $499. Kindle “apps” will be coming soon.

Litl Webbook

The “Litl WebBook” is definitely something different. It’s a three-pound laptop that boots into the Internet whenever it detects a wireless access point. From then on, you’re riding on a cloud.

This is a $699 totally web-based machine that uses cloud computing instead of installed programs. The cost is as much as a fully functional Windows computer, but you pay a stiff price to be early. Expect a number of these cloud computing devices to appear in the next few months and prices will drop in accordance.

The idea behind a cloud computer is that most people do everything they want with a computer by going on the Web. Whether it’s email, editing photos, watching videos, checking the news or whatever, they usually don’t need or want installed programs. That’s good for this device, because there’s no way to put them in. There’s no hard drive, CD or DVD drive, just you, the screen and a keyboard. Word processing, database and spreadsheet programs are all available on the web for free at places like Google Docs and Zoho. The Litl WebBook maintains itself by updating security settings whenever you’re not using it, as long as you’re near a Wi-Fi connection.

When you power on this laptop, you see a series of small frames, called “cards.” Each represents a different web activity. You can click on the “card catalog” to look at the most popular websites. The basic ones are photos, weather, online music, games, YouTube videos, Facebook, Google Docs, the New York Times, BBC News, Wall Street Journal, etc. A card called “Media Wall” keeps a slideshow running from your Flickr or Shutterfly account. Click “text size” to get a larger font without distorting the page.

The screen is 12 inches; the processor seemed plenty fast to us.  You can plug it into your TV with an HDMI (High Density Multichip Interconnect) cable and watch the Web on the big screen using a supplied remote control. It can be folded to stand on its own. The manual is just a collection of cards with notes, but you can click on Litl support and chat with a tech support person Monday through Friday.

This strikes us as the right computer for newbies. And it puts the fun back into the computing experience for old timers, since there’s nothing to go wrong. Litl uses the Linux operating system, but all of that is invisible to the user. All you see is the card catalog. The device turns on and off by pushing a button.  Battery life is about 3 hours, but most people will just leave it plugged in.

We connected it to our TV and went to Clicker.com to watch a biography of Mark Twain on “Biography,” a channel that’s not part of our regular TV service. It came right up.