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Before we get to today’s action, a recap of Friday’s barn-burner. The pundits (me) were wrong: Instead of a blowout, Friday’s match between the Archos 10 and the ASUS EeePC 1000 HE turned into the equivalent of the Lousiville/Siena game. Buoyed by an apparently rabid fan base, the Archos 10 (whose six-cell model now costs $349, which is $100 cheaper than when we reviewed it) staked out a huge lead before the 1000 HE rallied for the win–even then, only notching 55 percent of the votes. All in all, we had more than 2,200 votes.

Today’s game should prove no less exciting, as we have two of the notebook heavyweights duking it out: The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 versus the HP Mini 2140.

The HP Mini 2140 is an update to the company’s 2133 Mini-Note, released last year. The design is almost unchanged; a brushed aluminum lid and chassis, and an excellent keyboard. Unfortunately, the mouse buttons are still to the left and right of the touchpad, a concession to the compactness of the netbook, but one we’ve never liked.

While there’s only two USB ports, HP included an ExpressCard slot as well, which will no doubt appeal to the business travelers for whom this machine is intended. While the 2140 has a larger 10-inch screen than the 2133 (8.9 inches), the resolution has decreased, to 1024 x 576 from 1280 x 768.

Still, its six-cell battery lasted a very impressive 7 hours and 19 minutes, second only to the just-announced Samsung N110 (7:24). When we first reviewed the 2140, its price was $529, but a similar configuration can now be ordered from HP’s site for $479.

Facing off against the 2140, the Dell Mini 10 ($449 as reviewed) has an equally impressive (and large) keyboard, yet still manages to be one of the thinnest and lightest netbooks on the market.  Similar in design to both the Mini 9 and Mini 12, the Mini 10 has a 10-inch screen (natch) which, like the 2140, has a resolution of 1024 x 576.

Like MacBooks of late, the Mini 10’s mouse buttons are integrated into the low-friction trackpad, a smart idea that saves otherwise limited space. Additionally, the trackpad supports multitouch gestures.

The Mini 10 also has three USB ports, as well as an HDMI port–something not typically seen on a netbook. The main thing holding the Mini 10 back, however, is its battery life. Currently, the Mini 10 is only offered with a 3-cell battery, which got a runtime of 2:43 on the LAPTOP battery test–five minutes shy of the average for netbook batteries of that size. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but other netbooks, such as the Samsung NC10, offer a six-cell battery for the same price.  As we noted in the review, the Mini 10 will become a lot more compelling once Dell offers it with a six-cell battery, and mobile broadband, GPS, and integrated TV tuner options.

So which one do you think is better? The HP Mini 2140, with its silvery-aluminum skin, or the Dell Mini Inspiron 10, and its small and compact chassis.

With laptops (thanks to the recent surge in netbooks) outselling desktops, Microsoft’s Hardware Group doesn’t want to be left in the dust.  And thus today the company released three new notebook accessories including its Notebook Cooling Base and its Arc Mouse and  Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 in a new array of cheery colors.

The Notebook Cooling Base has a  built-in fan and a “efficient cooling channel to prevent overheating”. It is USB-powered so  forget those AAs. Available in white and black, it’s priced at $29.95 and will be available in July.

Also announced were special editions of the 4.5 star Arc Mouse in white, purple, olive green and blue which will be available this month for $49.95. See our full review of the Arc mouse.  Similarly the  Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 will be available in  blue, red, pink, green and purple. Check out higher resolution pictures of the new accessories below

For only one market is the Atom entirely verboten: server computers. Intel wants to protect this plum market, where it sells its latest and fastest processors and reaps its highest profits. Its Xeon family of server CPUs range in price from $200 to $3,000 for those destined for four-way to eight-way servers, according to Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight64. Intel sells its Atom CPU for as little as $29.

Marketed like sports cars, blazing-fast server CPUs are also power hogs, unable to tamp down their consumption even at idle.

“If you want Ferrari-like performance, you’re going to get Ferrari-like mileage,” said Ian Lao, an analyst with In-Stat Inc.

But as energy prices rise, an increasing number of users and vendors are experimenting with the Mini Cooper approach – that smaller can get you there just fine and at less cost.

“People may laugh at the idea of an Intel Atom server, but it all depends on what you want to do,” said consultant and Green Data Center Blog author Dave Ohara. .

Meanwhile,U.K.-based Tranquil PC Ltd. is selling Windows Home Servers running the Atom CPU. A Chicago hosting provider, SingleHop Inc., is leasing dual-core Atom servers to small business customers.

“There is definitely potential in the low-end server space,” Lao said. “If the application is what I call a simple ‘data pusher’ with little computation involved, an Atom server could be suited for that.”

But Microsoft Research is even testing Atom for large-scale data centers.

“Lots of companies are experimenting with various usages including Microsoft,” acknowledged an Intel spokesman in a Monday e-mail. “While some may experiment with servers, the current Atom is not the right fit for these opportunities. However, as we enter the many-core era and more devices and machines add Internet access, our Xeon, Core and Atom opportunities will be almost endless.”

But proponents say that Atom’s merits — low power consumption, fast sleep/wake features, low price — already make it worthy today.

For instance, Microsoft Research believes that the average server is sitting around doing nothing 75% of the time. In response, it is developing software that can put Atom servers to sleep, during which they use nearly zero power and instantly wake them on demand.

Atom CPUs, because they were originally targeted for mobile PCs like netbooks, have advanced sleep and power-saving features that conventional server CPUs lack.

The resulting energy savings are potentially so high that Atom servers might make sense, if judged by this formula: total cost, including energy costs over time, divided by the processing work actually delivered, instead of the conventional formula, which is dividing the CPU price by its maximum potential performance, i.e. its clock speed (GHz rating) or number of teraflops (trillion of mathematical calculations per second it can perform).

To reduce the preponderance of underused, power-draining servers, recent solutions have focused on two areas: Using virtualization to shift workloads to underused servers, or rewriting applications to better take advantage of multithreading, multicore CPUs.

The problem, Ohara said, is that many server applications are not multicore enabled or easily virtualized. Also, virtualization doesn’t always make sense. A data center may be too small to justify the upfront investment, he said. Or a data center may have hosting customers that, for security and liability reasons, prefer to keep their data on their own servers, rather than tying it with others in a virtualized fabric, Ohara said.

Ohara said Atom servers make sense for non-compute intensive applications such as home servers, small businesses and branch office servers, and perhaps servers for low-traffic Web sites.

But other areas? Not so much, said other analysts, citing these reasons:

Not enough bang for the buck: Whether intentionally crippled by Intel, as Ohara contended, or not, Atom CPUs just “aren’t high performers,” said independent analyst Jack Gold. “The whole intent with servers is to move a whole lot of data around … Atoms just aren’t optimized for this fast I/O.” While IT managers care about power costs, their job ultimately hinges on snappy server response times, which Atoms don’t help. “If server performance is bad, they’re going to hear about it from users,” Gold said.

Server sprawl: To duplicate the might of a single, multiway, multicore Xeon server might require dozens or even hundreds of Atom servers. That can quickly “get ugly,” Gold said, due to the immense amount of IT labor needed to manage them. Also, the extra footprint required by the Atom boxes might outweigh their energy savings when real estate prices start going back up again. “Color me skeptical,” Brookwood said. “Rather than armies of Atom-type arrays, I think the industry is going to keep moving toward a smaller number of larger Xeon boxes, all running virtualization.”

Overstated energy savings: In order to keep costs down and performance acceptable, each Atom server would likely have its own hard drive, rather than be attached to a central pool of storage servers, Brookwood said. Direct-attached storage like local hard drives tend to use a lot more energy per TB than large storage pools, Brookwood said. Attempting to boost performance and cut energy usage by installing solid-state drives (SSDs) would jack up the server price, he said.

Intel server chips incorporating Atom features, just not its cut-rate price: Analysts such as Lao expect Intel to bring in power-sipping features similar to the Atom’s into its new Xeon processors based on the Nehalem architecture, such as the ability to let applications or users completely turn off processor cores when idle. Ohara is skeptical about how much effect that will have, but Lao said it will enable Intel to “maintain that [market] segmentation” between Atoms and Xeons and prevent most customers from going for Intel’s cheaper offering. As a last resort, Intel can try to prevent manufacturers from building Atom servers, Gold said. Though antitrust wrangling and lawsuits may ensue, Gold argued that “at the end of the day, Intel has the right to sell what they want to people.”

China is offering subsidies to people in rural areas who buy PCs as part of a massive economic stimulus package the government hopes will keep the country from sliding into recession.

The subsidy program offers a rebate of 13 percent of the purchase price to rural Chinese who purchase a computer. The program could help domestic and multinational PC makers expand sales to less-developed but growing regions of China after national demand for computers fell well below expectations in the last quarter of 2008.

“We applaud the Chinese government for launching these kinds of programs,” said Steve Felice, president of Dell’s Small and Medium Business division. “We think that will help them enhance the lives of nearly 900 million farmers throughout China and help boost domestic consumption.”

Lenovo, China’s largest PC maker, also embraced the program. The company will extend its sales network to 320,000 villages over the next three years, it said Wednesday. It offers 15 computer models eligible for the subsidy program, ranging in price from 2,500 renminbi (US$365) to 3,500 renminbi, it said.

In comparison, average income for rural Chinese residents was 4,761 renminbi last year, far below the figure for urban residents of 15,781 renminbi, according to the country’s statistics bureau.

Hewlett-Packard will offer 15 eligible desktop and notebook models of its own, each equipped with agricultural and educational software to meet rural customers’ needs, the company said Thursday. The program creates a solid starting point for HP’s strategy of priming the rural market, HP said.

Besides PC makers, component makers will also benefit. Taiwanese LCD panel maker Chi Mei Optoelectronics said its first quarter sales will be better than expected because of the Chinese PC subsidy.

A slowdown in Chinese demand for PCs during the fourth quarter caught the industry by surprise and clouded the outlook for the coming year. On Monday, IDC lowered its forecast for annual growth in PC shipments to 3 percent in 2009, from an earlier forecast of 9 percent.

“I don’t think people anticipated around the world that emerging countries would get hit from the economic crisis in a way that’s more dramatic than the developed parts of the world, but that did in fact happen,” Felice said.

Faced with falling demand for exports to Europe and the U.S, China is counting on domestic demand and infrastructure projects to pick up some of the slack. China’s government announced a 4 trillion renminbi stimulus package in November to spur consumption.

The PC subsidy is one part of a wider subsidy program contained in the stimulus package that’s designed to spur rural demand for white goods and home electronics, including televisions and water heaters.

Continued strong economic growth is a key goal of China’s government, which worries that rising layoffs and growing numbers of unemployed workers could lead to widespread social unrest.

On Thursday, Premier Wen Jiabao told delegates at the annual National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing that China’s economy could grow by 8 percent this year. That number has long been seen as a critical level of economic growth, providing sufficient labor demand to employ the millions of university graduates and migrant workers who enter China’s workforce each year.

What impact the PC subsidy will have on China’s PC market remains to be seen, but observers don’t expect it to dramatically shift overall demand.

“Theoretically, it could help a bit,” said Bryan Ma, director of personal systems research at IDC Asia-Pacific. “But there won’t be any major accelerating impact on the market.”

Fujifilm mixed high and low today, announcing a $399 point-and-shoot and a $129 budget one. Like other cameras in the company’s F series, the FinePix F200EXR (right)  has the latest and greatest imaging technologies, which might one day trickle down into cheaper models.

In addition to 12-megapixel resolution and 5X optical zoom, the camera has Fujifilm’s new Super EXR CCD sensor, which allows for improved color fidelity and dynamic range (the latter is crucial in drawing out shadow details in harshly backlit situations).

The sensor has three shooting modes/usage situations: Fine Capture Mode (high resolution), which uses all twelve million pixels; Pixel Fusion Mode, which improves low-light performance by capturing two adjacent pixels together, creating a photodiode large enough to absorb a lot more light; and Dual Capture Mode, which improves dynamic range.

Sound confusing? An EXR Auto mode can decide which settings are best.

In addition, it has a 3-inch screen, HD output, Super Intelligent Flash, Portrait Enhancer Mode, dual IS, Dual Shot Mode, and High Speed Playback, and takes SD and xD cards. It’ll start shipping in February.

Meanwhile, the $129 FinePix A150 (right) has 10-MP resolution, 3X optical zoom, and face detection for up to 6 faces. It takes SD cards and AA batteries. It’ll ship in February