The latest possible reason that Northwest Flight 188 overshot its destination by more than 100 miles is that the pilots were distracted by their laptop PCs, The Journal reported Monday.

According to people familiar with the interviews held over the weekend between the pilots and the National Transportation Safety Board, the pilots said the snafu occurred as they were discussing work schedules over their laptops.

It’s not unheard of for members of a flight crew to pull out a personal computer during quiet periods of a flight, but investigators are still considering whether fatigue played a role, since the pilots didn’t respond to air-traffic controllers for more than 75 minutes.

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Cash-strapped consumers have been slow to buy personal computers in the recession. But with the launch of Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) new Windows 7 operating system Thursday, PC makers are aiming to reverse that trend–and then some.

Companies are expecting that Windows 7’s improved features over earlier Microsoft operating systems, including Vista and XP, will lure more consumers into stores. And they are betting that heightened demand will allow them to stanch recent price declines in the market.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), Dell Inc. (DELL), Toshiba America Inc. and Acer Inc., among others, are releasing a flood of high-end laptops with slim cases and glossy designs, and new one-piece touch-screen desktops, that they hope consumers will be willing to pay a premium for.

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Fancy new smart phones and laptops may generate more buzz, but the desktop PC remains the workhorse of the office. Bosses who outfit staffers with mobile devices, however, may be able to wring more work out of them, according to a new Forrester (FORR) study.

The research firm surveyed more than 2,000 employees at companies with 100 or more workers to find how they use technology. Three-quarters use desktop computers, and two-thirds are anchored to their desks for at least four hours a day.

Laptops were only available to one in three computer-using workers, though this varied by profession–47 percent of business employees had them, compared with only 17 percent of retail and manufacturing workers. A mere 11 percent of workers owned smart phones, though that percentage was higher for salespeople and marketers.

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Google (GOOG) is taking its campaign to promote its Chrome Web browser up a notch, sealing an alliance with Sony to have the Web browser pre-installed on some Sony (SNE) notebook computers.

A Google spokesman said Monday that Chrome will be pre-installed on some Sony laptops. He declined to comment on financial terms of the deal and the geographic scope of the partnership, which he called a test. Sony didn’t return requests for comment.

Google will need a lot more than Sony’s relatively small computer market share to make a dent. As of July, Chrome accounted for 2.6 percent of the global Web browser market, according to Net Applications.

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Unflattering tales about lithium-ion batteries are once again making headlines, this time in Apple’s (AAPL) iPhones. In France, users have reported 10 cases of exploding or cracking iPhones, while similar claims have been reported elsewhere.

The last time such batteries broke into the news was three years ago, when Sony (SNE) voluntarily recalled millions of laptop batteries after they were found to cause laptops to possibly overheat and catch fire. Though Sony admitted issues with quality control, experts at the time blamed part of the problem on the increased demand that sophisticated portable devices are placing on lithium-ion batteries.

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Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that some New York coffee shops were pulling the plug on customers that park themselves at tables, open their laptops, and hang out for hours, buying perhaps only a single latte as their cafe rental fee.

While independent coffee shops that are struggling to make ends meet may see the need to flush out the low-revenue laptop users, the major chains are not so strapped.

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Thousands of fans gathered in Ashburn last week for the opening of Redskins training camp, separated from their oversize heroes by a long barricade. But when the players left the field and returned to the locker room, fans suddenly had unprecedented access to the players’ thoughts and whims through their laptops and mobile devices.

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Apple is now calling its MacBook laptops “the world’s greenest lineup of notebooks” instead of “the world’s greenest family of notebooks” in response to a recommendation by the Better Business Bureau’s advertising division.

The division came to the recommendation after rival computer maker Dell (DELL) challenged Apple’s (AAPL) MacBook marketing, which refers, among other things, to the devices’ energy usage, packaging and recyclable components.

Dell’s complaints, according to a report published by the Bureau’s National Advertising Division, include Apple’s reference to its gold ratings by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, or EPEAT — ratings Dell said it and other PC makers have also received.

It also pointed out four “pillars” in Apple’s MacBook ads — recyclability, reduced packaging, less toxic materials and increased energy efficiency — and claimed that “Apple must, but does not, establish superiority over all of its competitors in all four pillars to support its broad superiority claim…many competing laptops offer the same characteristics it cites as the basis of superiority (e.g., recyclability).”

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There’s a discussion taking place in the PC industry that is equal parts encouraging and sad.

Some of the companies making and selling computers are contemplating a way to give people a more accurate idea of how long the batteries in their devices will last.

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Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is a prolific blogger and tweeter about issues of concern to the chip maker. One of his biggest pet peeves is how battery life is measured in laptops, a topic that he thinks is going to become very hot.

How hot? Well, Moorhead predicts that if the industry doesn’t come up with better ways to give consumers realistic estimates of battery life, the issue will be forced in one of two other ways: class-action suits will be brought on behalf of consumers, or an agency like the Federal Trade Commission will intervene. (Not that he is aware of either kind of action taking place yet, he hastens to add).

At a briefing Monday in San Francisco, Moorhead pulls out a bunch of advertising circulars from retailers, which include estimates of battery life for laptops that he contends are hopelessly unrealistic.

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Netbooks are hot. Intel (INTC) estimates that the laptops–which can cost less than $300–sold faster in their first 12 months on the market than Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone or Nintendo’s Wii game console did. Could a similar low-end niche emerge in server systems?

It’s too early to tell, but there are some tantalizing signs–and some big ramifications if the trend takes hold.

First, some background: Hardware companies have long tried to convince customers to buy new machines that do computing work faster. Many customers in recent years have moved an increasing percentage of jobs away from “big iron”–mainframes and other servers that use proprietary circuitry–in favor of inexpensive servers based on the same x86 chip design used in PCs.

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Cell phones and laptops may seem like pretty minor offenders when it comes to energy guzzling. But as they become ubiquitous all over the planet, their growing power consumption is emerging as a major source of concern for those trying to conserve energy and stop global warming.

Communication gadgets and other consumer electronics burn up 15 percent of all the electricity consumed in households around the world, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. If the use of electronics continues to spread at the current pace, their energy draw could double by 2022 and triple by 2030. At that point, they would absorb as much electricity as all houses in the U.S. and Japan today.

But are electric gadgets vampires or saviors? Telecommuters who would otherwise burn gasoline to get to work, or drivers who get to their destination quicker by using a GPS device are actually saving energy, argues the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

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As I said in my post last Sunday on Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads, it’s unrealistic to expect TV commercials to contribute to a thoughtful discussion of anything. An exercise in comparison shopping between Windows and PCs that takes place in a sixty-second Microsoft (MSFT) commercial just isn’t going to be fair and balanced, any more than an Apple (AAPL) commercial is going to explain that it’s possible to get respectable Windows laptops for a whole lot less than the cheapest Macs.

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With the economy affecting all manner of consumer spending, it’s a little surprising to hear upbeat commentary from the flat-panel sector.

But according to Scott Birnbaum, vice president of Samsung’s LCD unit, its sales are benefiting from “vidification,” a term he uses to describe consumers trying to create a big-screen experience at home.

“When you went to the movie theater, you had this incredible picture and sound,” he says, and makers of televisions, PCs and even cellphones are all looking for ways to offer a similar viewing environment.

For PCs, manufacturers are quickly adopting a 16:9 aspect ratio, the length-to-height ratio that has been a standard for HD television screens, Mr. Birnbaum says. That means that laptops are becoming less boxy and more like wide-format TV screens, a trend that computer makers have capitalized on to goose sales. When one of these laptops is side-by-side with an older model, he says, “people are gravitating to the new format very quickly.”

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Is Apple (AAPL) in the process of reinventing the way mainstream headphones are designed for the second time this decade?

Ten years ago, I was the only guy on the train wearing earbuds. Thanks to Apple’s iPod, now everyone is. Is the remote control clicky-thing the next thing every set of earphones has to have?

Apple has been shipping earbuds with built-in microphones and in-line remote controls since the iPhone went on sale in June, 2007. But they’ve increasingly become useful with other Apple products. The new iPod touch and iPod nano, released last fall, respond to the remote control to play and pause tracks, and can access the microphone. New Mac laptops do, too.

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