After taking a medical leave of absence in January, Steve Jobs on Monday officially resumed his work as chief executive of Apple.

"Steve is back to work," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, told Bloomberg News. Jobs will be working at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, for "a few days a week", and working from home on the rest, according to the report.

Jobs was initially said to be taking a break from work to focus on recuperating from a hormone imbalance. But, in April, he received a liver transplant from a hospital in Tennessee.

Dell is developing a pocket-sized Internet device using Google's Android operating system that could take on Apple's iPod touch, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.

Two people who have seen early prototypes of the device told the newspaper it looks like the touch but is slightly larger. And, like the touch, the device isn't expected to include a phone. The device is considered part of a category of gadgets called 'mobile Internet devices' (MIDs), which are designed to fit into the market between a mobile phone and a laptop or netbook computer.

The device could go on sale as early as the second half of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal's sources.

Disney and Asus have teamed up make something no one's really nailed yet: an affordable and functional portable PC for children. According to USA Today, it comes in the form of a netbook with an Intel Atom processor, a small, 8.9-inch screen, parental control options and desktops with customisable themes such as Cars, Toy Story, WALL-E and Hannah Montana.

Radically overhauled last year, Apple's MacBook line of laptops moved to aluminium construction, edge-to-edge glass over LED displays, and oversize multitouch-touch pads (with the exception of the lone £749 white plastic model). The latest round of updates is more of a refinement than another revolution, but it adds some much-sought-after features, while lowering prices on many configurations.

Notably, the 13-inch aluminium unibody MacBook has been promoted to join the MacBook Pro family -- and CNET.com's Dan Ackerman gets his hands on it in this video.

Pixel Qi was at Computex in Taiwan this week, demonstrating its 3qi display technology, which integrates e-paper attributes with LCD to create a versatile and potentially very energy-efficient screen.

The idea is that with a flip of a button you can go from a traditional high-resolution colour LCD experience to a low-power black and white mode to an even more energy-efficient e-paper mode, which allows you to easily view text in bright sunlight. Check out the demo video after the jump.

Acer has announced plans to build netbooks running Google's Android operating system. Android will be an option in the Aspire One line.

There's still only a couple of Android-based phones -- including the T-Mobile G1 and HTC Magic -- but the OS is already on version 1.5 and is adding new features all the time.

Designed for mobile phones, the Linux-based OS nonethless seems like a perfect fit for netbooks: it's lightweight, portable, open source and customisable. The crossover is clear, as Acer has already punted two phones: the dual-SIM Tempo DX900 and the frankly woeful Tempo X960. Having joined the Open Handset Alliance, an Acer Android phone is expected late this year.

To our knowledge, Chinese firm Skytone made the first announcement of an Android-powered netbook, but we've heard whispers that Google slapped Android on a laptop ages ago, just for spits and giggles.

Asus has announced the U series of laptops: the U20A, U80V, U50Vg and UX50V are claimed to benefit from low power consumption and decent battery life.

The U20A boasts a 12.1-inch screen, the U80V has a nice round 14-inches, and the U50V -- pictured here -- and UX50V both sporting 15.6-inch 16:9 high-definition screens. All the screens are LED-backlit displays with light-in-motion, an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts screen brightness. According to Asus, the result is 50 per cent less power consumption than traditional LCD panels.

Apple on Wednesday updated its low-end consumer laptop, adding a slightly faster processor and a larger hard drive.

The 13-inch white MacBook now comes with a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, adding a little more speed over the previous 2GHz processor. The hard drive has also been increased from 120GB to 160GB in the upgrade.

Memory for the machine remains at 2GB DDR2, expandable to 4GB for an extra £80. Apple has made no changes to the graphics card, choosing to stay with the Nvidia GeForce 9400M unit.

Intel has given the first preview of its next-generation Atom chip, with a more integrated design intended to improve performance and energy efficiency.

The company also launched the beta of version 2.0 of the Linux-based Moblin netbook platform, with a new interface.

The upcoming Atom chip, code-named 'Pineview', incorporates the memory controller and graphics chip onto the same silicon as the processor, a more efficient design that should lower costs for system builders, lower energy consumption and improve performance, Intel said.

If you've got a Mac with an Intel chip and you're itching to scoff at Microsoft fanboys who reckon Windows 7 will be a huge step forward, fret no longer. You can easily setup and run Win7 in a virtual environment on an Intel Mac -- we've tried it out. We can't advise every Intel Mac user to try this, but if you're an experienced computer user and take care to make sure your current data is backed up beforehand, this method for getting the Windows 7 Release Candidate on your Mac is pretty simple. The best part about it? It's free.

Keeping track of the names of gadgets is a notorious minefield, and netbooks are no exception. Three cheers then for the Lenovo's IdeaPad S10-2: as the name suggests, it's an improved take on the S10. Huuzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

The original S10 was well received, even if a little lost in the current glut of netbooks. The S10-2, true to its moniker, doesn't change that much, but we have absolutely no problem with a good thing getting better.

Our chums at Crave US have had their hands on the S10-2, noting that the most notable improvement over the original is the larger right-shift key on the tweaked keyboard. They've also whacked in a third USB port, enlarged the trackpad and glossy'd up the screen.

We branded the S10 as officially gorgeous, and the sequel is even prettier.

Android software developer Bsquare announced on Wednesday that it'll port Adobe Flash Lite to Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook. One problem: Dell has yet to announce any Android netbooks in its arsenal.

Apparently, what we have here is a little public relations mixup.

An Apple job posting, which has now been taken down, suggests the company might be thinking about adding 3G wireless radios to future MacBooks.

According to the posting, spotted by Computerworld, Apple's Mac Hardware Group is seeking a quality-assurance engineer with experience in the various networking technologies popular in the personal computing market, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 'and/or 3G wireless WAN'.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Ethernet are the standard network interfaces on the Mac at the moment, while 3G wireless WAN is a technology confined just to the iPhone inside Apple.

Apple could be getting ready to cut prices on iMacs and MacBooks.

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple plans to introduce less expensive versions of its two most popular Macs at some point over the next several months. It's not clear how much of a cut Apple has in mind, or whether it plans to offer more value at current prices, but Apple has apparently decided that it wants to hedge its bets against a proliferation of cheap netbooks over the last year or so, according to the report.

Mac pricing has certainly been a big topic over the last several months, as Microsoft has aggressively pushed the notion of the Mac as an expensive bauble unfit for recessionary spending.

In the yet-to-be-released iTunes 8.2, Blu-ray gets a mention on the 'About iTunes' splash screen.

For those not well-versed in the world of Apple computers, Mac machines currently don't support Blu-ray discs. Although you can install a third-party optical drive in the Mac Pro, you'll still need to boot into Windows to read Blu-ray media. But, if iTunes is going to allow ripping from these discs, we might finally see Macs and MacBooks with fully integrated Blu-ray support and drives.

Back in October, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs famously called Blu-Ray and its licensing process "a bag of hurt", implying that it was too expensive and too complicated for Apple to add Blu-ray drives to Macs.