With the economy in decline, many fear that the one company to take the financial blow would be Apple. The company focusses on the higher end of the market (at least in price), and with many people having less and less money to spend, as well as facing insecure financial prospects, people may decide to choose for a cheaper, non-Apple computer. Piper Jaffray, an Apple-friendly analyst firm, has projected that the Cupertino company is about to face a decline in year-over-year Mac sales; for the first time in six years.

We already knew netbooks were popular, but according to new data by research firm IDC, they are even more popular in Europe than we anticipated. The firm says that in 2008, netbooks sales accounted for 30% of total consumer portable sales in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa. A big contributing factor are the telecommunication providers in Europe who subsidise netbooks.

The Author's Guild has been having some trouble coping with the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature because it supposedly undermines author's rights. Their argument? "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." It sounds ridiculous; we've been reading out loud since we were wee little children, and text-to-speech has been in use since before the Google Empire (by hundreds of years technically, and by decades literally). However, after explanation by Engadget's very own pretentious ex-copyright attorney, the blurred lines of law and lawlessness gets even blurrier. Does the Author's Guild have a valid point, or are they splitting hairs?

A new phone based on Google's operating system Android has been unveiled by Vodafone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The touchscreen HTC Magic will feature a 3.2 Megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS, but no slide-out keyboard. The first "Google phone", called the G1, was launched in September by HTC and is exclusive to T-mobile. The Magic will feature new Android firmware, known as "Cupcake", with changes based on G1 user suggestions.

Practically before the trial is up and running, The Pirate Bay has achieved a major victory over the entertainment industry. On day two, the prosecutor has dropped half of the charges against the bittorrent website. The remaining charges are much lighter than the ones that have been dropped.

Earlier this year, Freescale announced it would enter the netbook market with its own set of chips based on the ARM architecture, claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today. The company gave a little more info today, and among other things, they want to support Google's Android on their netbooks.

Windows Mobile is a relic of the past. Especially compared to Apple's iPhone operating system, it becomes painfully obvious just how outdated, clunky, and unfriendly Windows Mobile has become. Today, Mictosoft has taken its first step in modernising the platform by releasing a sort of alpha release of Windows Mobile 6.5, with a completely revamped interface.

Andrew Doran and Jared D. McNeill have announced in a mailing list post that they are starting a NetBSD Desktop Project with the goal of: "Given a NetBSD CD and a reasonably modern x86 computer, make it possible to install a useful desktop system in under 15 minutes, responding to only a few prompts in the process." Initial plans are being formulated on the project wiki page.

Late last week we ran a story on how the Google Chrome team had decided to use Gtk+ as the graphical toolkit for the Linux version of the Chrome web browser. It was a story that caused some serious debate on a variety of aspects, but in this short editorial, I want to focus on one aspect that came forward: the longing for consistency. Several people in the thread stated they were happy with Google's choice for purely selfish reasons: they use only Gtk+ applications on their GNOME desktops. Several people chimed in to say that Qt integrates nicely in a Gtk+ environment. While that may be true from a graphical point of view, that really isn't my problem with mixing toolkits. The issue goes a lot deeper than that.

In a textbook example of "dweilen met de kraan open", the landmark trial against Torrent website The Pirate Bay will take off today in Sweden. The founders of the torrent website are charged with aiding millions of internet users gain access to illegal content. Basically the entire entertainment industry is amassing against The Pirate Bay, making this one of the biggest trials against internet file sharing in history.

Geeks.com, known for their cheap televisions, sent us in the 22" Vizio VO22LFHDTV model for a review. This full 1080p has the size of a PC monitor, so it was tested as both a TV and a PC monitor, and as a hybrid: external TV monitor for video editing while connected to a PC. Its size makes it ideal for such a scenario, but is it really the ideal product for this kind of usage?

This week at Mobile World Congress Microsoft will release a free technology preview of Microsoft Recite. Microsoft Recite runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 or higher and allows the user to record voice notes and then store, search and retrieve information from them by simply speaking a word that they want to search for.

It was a fun week for OSNews, with many interesting debates on polarising subjects such as the global menubar in GNOME, Chrome using Gtk+ on Linux, and Cuba moving to Linux. We also took a look at Haiku, talked to Nicki Clyne and the CEO of Lunascape, and reported on a few releases of small operating systems. This week's My Take is about the economic crisis.

A new version of the experimental HelenOS operating system has been released. Version 0.4.0 features a simple user command line interface, FAT file system support, application loader and tracer, improved hardware support for ia64, ppc32 and sparc64, and many other improvements over the previous release. Get it from their download page.