Western Digital shipped the industry’s first 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive last summer, but sadly it couldn’t be used as a drop-in solution for upgrading your laptop drive. This is because it relies on a 12.5mm height form factor, while the majority of laptops only support 9.5mm height drives.

Well, now they’ve outed the 750GB Scorpio Blue, a 2.5-inch drive that uses the standard height form factor. The unit includes Advanced Format and WhisperDrive for just $149.

Dell’s new 15-inch Precision M4500 with a Core i5-520M 2.5GHz starts at $1,549 and still packs in NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M Graphics. Realistically it will cost you a bit more. I mean, you’ll want to upgrade 2GB of slow RAM, a 1366 x 768 LCD, and there’s no WiFi at that price.

You’ll want to go for options like a secondary 64GB SSD minicard drive and Precision ON. So you can expect it to be in the $2,500+ range.

Here’s an interesting concept for you if you really love a full-sized keyboard when using a netbook. It comes from designer Yang Yongchang and offers a sturdy yet small design.

It could do with a large touchpad, but it’s still a very cool idea. Hopefully it won’t turn into an Autobot or Decepticon and kick your butt. If you combine this design with an extra pull-out display, you might just have a winner.

Everything comes with apps these days, so why should your router be any different? Belkin is jumping on the app bandwagon by supplying apps with its new Play Max routers. The Belkin apps will help you do things like detect issues, play music or backup your data for you. The apps are accessible through the Belkin Router Monitor an on-screen network navigator.

For instance, the Memory Safe App can automatically back up photos and important files to an external hard drive attached to the router. There aren’t many apps at the moment, but they are available on the Belkin Play Max routers if your interested which start around $129.99

If you need to charge your credit cards using your iPhone, here’s yet another option. This is an accessory that will make your business as a merchant truly mobile like never before. The Swipe It Reader from Macally is another Secure Credit Card Terminal available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The device lets you dock your iPhone along with a slot for swiping cards and works along side the Simply Swipe It app, which costs just $0.99. The Swipe It Reader can operate on both Wifi and 3G, and it supports most popular credit cards and many popular merchant gateways.

There’s only a few days left before you get your very own iPad. Now Apple has gone and posted some tutorial videos on their site. This way, by the time you get it in your hands, you can feel like an expert and impress your friends.

The tutorials cover pretty much everything you need to know, like the native iPad applications, from Safari to Videos, along with several applications you’ll have to download from the iPad App Store. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers make an appearance as well. They’re not super detailed, but they do a good job of covering all the bases.

Cowon has launched the Cowon J3 AMOLED PMP for the Korean market. It features a 3.3-inch AMOLED (480 x 272) touchscreen display, a DMB and Bluetooth. You’ll also get a built-in speaker, a voice recorder, a dictionary, TV-Out, and a MicroSD Slot.

The J3 is currently available in 4, 8 or 16GB capacities. The built-in battery is said to deliver a battery life with 64 hours of audio playback or 11 hours of video playback, which is pretty outstanding. It looks pretty stylish too.

Vertu is outing four cool new models for their upcoming anniversary. These include the Kinko, Kikusui, Nanten and Daigo. These have real gold all over and as usual it costs a ridiculous amount to get mediocre specs.

If you have a spare fortune and don’t believe in charity, you’ll want to buy one as soon as possible. $215,000 is just pocket money. All four of them sport unique and cool designs. Try not to get mugged because of your phone.

A turntable for $27,800? It better come with some gold records and a diamond needle. The UniSon MK II turntable by DaVinci Audio Labs may not be decked out in gold, but it does have a seriously stable drive chassis and silent bearings, which means zero noise or vibration from the turntable itself.

We don’t have a good answer as to why it costs so much. We can only assume that DaVinci is working out of a whole different economy than we are. Maybe they just want to sell a few and then roll around in money.

The BeoVision 10-46 is the latest HDTV from B&O. You get 46 inches of viewing real estate, plus “a new and exciting LED-based, 240Hz LCD panel” and unnamed “sophisticated motion compensation technologies” that apparently feature “a yet unseen level of smoothness.”

Wow. Sounds “swell”. Look for this one to be unveiled on April 14 in Denmark and to go on sale this summer. The price? A cool 54,990 DKK (or about $9,940).

Spiders are icky, creepy and nasty. You have to get them out of your home at all costs. But maybe you don’t want to kill them. After all, it isn’t their fault that they are nasty creepy bugs. So normally you would use a glass to trap them on the wall and escort them outside. But that isn’t possible when they are on the corners of your wall.

This Cornered Glass trap was designed by James Laurie for just such occasions. This way you can still catch it and put it outside.

AMD has launched their latest counter attack against Intel with the Opteron 6000 8 & 12 core chips. This comes just a day before Intel unveils its 8 core Nehalem EX Xeon processors that are designed for four-socket servers.

Manufacturers like Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cray, SGI and Appro are just a few of the companies that are unveiling new or upgraded systems using AMD’s new Opteron 6000 8 & 12 core chips. The Opteron 6000 processor series perform at up to two times the level of AMD’s previous generation of 6 core processors, with an 88% increase in integer performance and a 119% increase in floating point performance.

If you’re looking for an affordable GPS watch to wear while jogging and such, Garmin has just announced the Garmin Forerunner 110 GPS watch. You get some decent features for the price.

The watch can be used for up to eight hours in GPS mode and three weeks in standby mode. The Forerunner 110 features Garmin’s HotFix technology to quickly acquire and hold satellite signals. You can upload your stats to Garmin Connect, and it can hold up to 200 hours of data.

MSI has a bunch of different notebook and netbook models. Most of its machines are powered by Intel CPUs with the Atom being popular in the netbook line. Rumors are circulating that a new notebook is coming from MSI called the U250 that will have a dual-core AMD CPU.

The U250 will use an AMD Athlon II Neo dual core K325 CPU running at 1.3GHz. The machine will have 4GB of RAM and 320GB of storage. The GPU will have 512MB of dedicated RAM, but it doesn’t say what GPU will be used.

Normally when I am talking about something that has turned up on Yanko Design, we are talking about a product that is a mere concept and will probably never be able to be purchased. Yanko has a cool watch today called the 1/4 Watch that you can buy.

The watch come in red, blue, black, and white colors and can be purchased for $85. The watch has a case that measures 39mm x 31mm x 7mm and is water resistant. The case is made from stainless steel and it has a mineral glass crystal.