OSNews reviews the Litl Webbook, an Atom mini-notebook with an innovative convertible form-factor and a custom, web-centric Linux-based OS. (Includes video review). Update: Turns out that Havoc Pennington, proponent of the Gnome Online Desktop, now works at Litl. No coincidence.

"Google's much-anticipated new phone, the HTC-designed Nexus One, could make its debut next week. Google has scheduled a press event for Tuesday, January 5 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters. Though the company hasn't mentioned Nexus One, the invitation mentions Android, Google's mobile operating system for phones, and the company is widely expected to show the device that has had smartphone industry watchers buzzing for weeks."

Earlier this month, Psystar suspended all sales of its hardware products, honouring the court's decision which favoured Apple. This week, Psystar has also temporarily halted sales of Rebel EFI while the former clone maker confirms the tool's legality with the court. Psystar also announced it will continue hardware sales in the coming days - with Linux rather than Mac OS X.

Continuing with our slow-news-week theme, I'd bring your attention to Dave Barry's year-end column. People outside the US may not be familiar with Barry, a prominent nationally-syndicated satirist whose columns are full of hyberbolic nonsense. But in addition to national and international events, he covers some technology news to, excerpted after the jump.

Since the news is still somewhat slow today due to the holiday season, let's talk about something I initially didn't want to talk about at all: it was widely reported today that AT&T stopped online sales of the iPhone in New York City. AT&T gave a number of different reasons as to why, before resuming online sales later during the day. Storm, meet teacup.

Mozilla won't make a 2009 deadline for releasing Firefox 3.6 and is giving itself more time to complete a major update, version 4.0. The organization behind the open-source Web browser had predicted a final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009, but the Mozilla Web site now includes "ship Firefox 3.6" as a goal for the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Firefox 4.0, which had been due in 2010, now is "aimed at late 2010 or early 2011," with a beta due in the summer of 2010, according to Mozilla.

Since the stream of news is still pretty much dry, I figured I'd throw in something I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, but really didn't dare to: KDE4's performance. Since experiences with KDE4 seem to widely differ between people, it might be a good idea if we, together, can find a common cause among those of us having problems.

"Their arrival heralded a new age of communications and they played a major role in the explosion of the internet. We're talking, of course, about modems. Here we look back on the development of this remarkable device."

You really know the tumbleweeds are rolling across the dusty plains of the internet when you have not one, but two technically pointless stories about "Show us your !" Yes, I figured that while we're at it, we might as well take a look at not just our operating system's desktops, but also our real desktops.

At the end of the year, mainly to shamelessly fill slow news around the holidays, OSNews usually asks the readers to share with all the other readers something about their computer setup. Since OSNews can be quite diverse when it comes to computing environments, these threads can often be quite interesting. This year, please chime in with the setup you use to read OSNews - computer, OS, software and maybe even provide screenshots or photos of your proud workspace. Has it changed a lot this year? Maybe switched browser, maybe switched OS even? Let everybody know!

The time of Christmas is obviously upon us. Programmers and bloggers all over the world are putting down their text editors, meaning there's no news for us to report on (unless you want to talk about yet another set of rumours about the Apple tablet). Still, I couldn't let this day go by without a story.

"Google's Chrome OS does not run local applications or store local data. Everything is handled inside the browser. But when the much-hyped operating system debuts on netbooks at the end of next year, you can bet it will execute native code on behalf of online Google applications such as Gmail or Docs and Spreadsheets. In other words, Google apps will tap directly into the netbook's processor in an effort to close the performance gap that separates them from the local software offered by its bete noire, Steve Ballmer's Microsoft. And this being Google, they won't use Java, Flash, or Silverlight."

After two long years since the last release, Cygwin 1.7 (a Linux-like environment that runs on Windows systems) has been released. Among many other improvement, this release adds support for Windows 7 and Server 2008R2.

The past few weeks the entire internet has been going bonkers over the Google phone, yet another in a long line of Android phones that has everyone's knickers in twists. Up until now we had to go by small photos and Twitter messages from Google employees, but now we have full specifications, a hands-on, and video.