“For a lot of people,” says Ken Mingis (computerworld.com), “smaller and lighter is better when it comes to their laptops.” He considers MacBook Air “one of the coolest-looking laptops to appear in years — both in terms of size and hipness.” It has “a gorgeous display that looks sharper and brighter on the Air than it does on the regular MacBook.” And, he says, “waking it up from sleep mode took about 2 seconds, and the LED backlighting means the screen hit full brightness as soon as it was awake.” As for performance: “The Air feels just about as snappy as my MacBook Pro in day-to-day use doing the kinds of things most users will be doing: surfing the Web, firing off e-mails, text editing and light graphics work.”

For the first time, music fans can enjoy all of the contestant performances from Season Seven of American Idol, television’s most popular show, exclusively on iTunes. This week, performances of the “American Idol” Top 24 semifinalists will be the first to appear on iTunes. You also can purchase music performances for 99 cents per song. Starting March 11, you’ll also be able to purchase the full video of Top 12 finalist performances for $1.99. And, beginning today, you can pre-order performances of your favorite contestants from the iTunes Store, which will automatically download the day after the show airs. The exclusive availability comes to you thanks to a partnership of Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox Interactive Media, 19 Entertainment, FremantleMedia and Apple.

“Apple has done well with Aperture 2.0, based on my test of ingesting and editing a batch of my own photos on a dual-core iMac,” remarks Stephen Shankland in a recent article on CNET. And, he points out, he’s not the only one to notice the dramatic performance gains: “I feel like someone snuck a new CPU into my machine,” gushed photographer Josh Anon in a Wednesday blog posting.” “On top of a general performance boost,” Shankland continues, Aperture 2 delivers “a new preview mode that specifically emphasizes speed,” an entirely “new raw-processing engine” that delivers significant advantages, and a variety of other new features, as well.

Reviewing MacBook Air for the Daily Telegraph, Claudine Beaumont notes that most of the staff there “have found this lightweight laptop very impressive.” MacBook Air, she indicates “is a delightfully designed gadget, hewn from aluminum and glass, and draws amazed gasps from almost all who see it. It’s hard to appreciate just how slim it is until you hold it for yourself.” While “there’s no doubt the Air is beautifully designed,” Beaumont points out that it also “ packs all of the powerhouse computing we expect from Apple.”

The cellphone industry went to Barcelona to “show off the latest and greatest phones” and, once again, hardware took center stage. But, Victoria Shannon (New York Times) points out, “software is growing in importance as smartphones, capable of accessing the Web, become more popular.” So, Shannon continues, “it was no surprise that many of the phones were iPhone clones — with touch screens, sleek flat shapes and spare software interfaces. Apple was able to make a phone that paid equal attention to the software and the hardware. And the rest of the industry was following suit here.”

Macworld’s Jonny Evans reports that “Google has confirmed it has seen 50 times more searches from the iPhone than from any other mobile handset. ‘We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,’ Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.” Evans also indicates that O2 “recently confirmed the iPhone to be driving ‘unheard of data traffic’ on the mobile network.”

“The best recent advance in the mobile telecommunications user space came not from a mobile telecom company but from Apple Inc. — the iPhone.” That, according to David Benjamin (EE Times) was the conclusion reached by a “blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.” And, Benjamin points out, “Anup Murarka, director of technical marketing for Adobe, cited a study showing that 77 percent of iPhone purchasers described themselves as “very satisfied” with their user experience.”

You’ve probably downloaded scores of PDFs from the Web and no doubt created many of your own in Mac OS X. But did you know that Leopard gives you more control of PDFs than ever, even letting you reorder or delete pages, insert or extract pages, or add Spotlight search terms? We show you how to use Preview to manipulate PDFs in the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

If my hunch is correct,” writes Julio Ojeda-Zapata (TwinCities.com), “business-class airliner cabins will be filled with corporate types whipping out their MacBook Airs for work amid admiring glances from seatmates.” MacBook Air, after all, “is one sexy portable,” a laptop that “screams luxury with its extra-bright display (a newfangled light-emitting-diode variant) and a full-size, backlit keyboard that has a great, firm feel.” Ojeda-Zapata suggests that “business types needing ultraportability with style and comfort won’t be able to resist the Air. They can even wedge Windows in there (I did so with no trouble).”

Apple TV remains “a fantastic way for people to get their iTunes-purchased movies, music and TV shows from their computers onto their living room TVs.” And now “what’s even better” about Apple TV Take Two, concludes Jason Chen (Gizmodo) “is that it doesn’t require a computer to function. People can plop down an Apple TV into their homes and rent movies, listen to iTunes music, sync up with their grandchildren’s Flickr or .Mac streams, or just waste an hour surfing YouTube.”