When it comes to tech gear it seems like every maker wants to say they have the smallest this or fastest that. The latest new products in the tech realm to lay claim to a world’s smallest title is LaCie with a pair of new USB 3.0 HDDs.

The new drives are the LaCie Rikiki and the Minimus USB 3.0 HDDs. The USB 3.0 connectivity allows the drives to have transfer speeds up to5Gb/s in small form factors. Both of the HDDs are clad in attractive brushed aluminum cases.

I have seen the Willow Garage PR2 robot a few times around the web and the thing is really cool. When you consider the fact that the PR2 was only being sold to research institutions and universities it was easy to imagine that meant the bot was very expensive.

Willow Garage is now selling the PR2 to anyone who can afford it. That list of people who can afford the PR2 will be short considering the thing costs $400,000. For that much money, you get two arms with grippers, an omnidirectional mobile base, a sensor suite, and dual onboard Xeon servers each with 8-cores, 24GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage, and a power system on board.

Notebook users know that the power adapter for their machines often seems as big and heavy as the notebook itself. It can be a real challenge to fit that adapter into your notebook bag or suitcase when going on the road because of the bulk. Cooler Master has unveiled a new universal 95W adapter for small notebooks that is very thin and small.

The adapter is called the USNA 95 and it has 95W of power with 150W peak. The small adapter measures 2.4″ x 0.7″ x 4.1″ and is billed as the world’s smallest 95W power adapter. The device ships with nine tips that work with the majority of notebooks on the market.

Many Toshiba fans have no doubt been drooling over the company’s AC100 Android-powered netbook and waiting patiently to get their hands on it. Well, it’s now available to order. You’ll need £293 (or $451 yankee dollars) for the Wi-Fi-only version.

The 3G version is called the 10U, is currently still in development, so you’ll need to wait on that one. In the meantime, the Wi-Fi version will give you a 10-inch display, Android 2.1, NVIDIA dual-core Tegra 250 …

I will say right up front that I never really saw the point of smartbooks. They are the same basic size as a netbook, though they are a pound or so lighter. The big downside in my mind has always been the performance of a smartbook.

Inside the smartbooks netbook looking shell hides hardware with more in common with a smartphone. If you like the smartbook promise a new machine from Genesi has landed called the Efika MX Smartbook. The machine can be purchased now for $349.

If you are one of the hoards of folks that have been waiting for more info on the Galaxy Tab some news has surfaced today. We already know that here in the US the thing will sell in the $200 to $400 range depending on subsidies from carriers.

That subsidized price will obviously mean there will be a contract for a couple years tying you to the carrier and its data plan. Over in Europe the subsidized price for the Tab via O2 is said to be 99 euro with a data plan contract for a bit less than 28 euro per month. If you want the thing sans contract in Europe, Amazon Germany has priced the thing.

We love anything that helps us get rid of wires around here. So we are excited about Energizer’s new inductive charger that is Qi enabled. Qi is the wireless charging standard developed by the Wireless Power Consortium, and should eventually make its way into more and more devices.

The charger will work with the iPhone or the Blackberry Curve 8900. The battery door for the Blackberry and the sleeve case for the iPhone 3G/3GS are both sold separately. Luckily, this device has enough room to charge three devices at the same time, which is nice.

ViewSonic at IFA gave away many of the details surrounding its dual-booting ViewPad tablet. Now dubbed the ViewPad 100, the 10-inch tablet runs on a 1.66GHz Atom and uses either Windows 7 or the now old Android 1.6; either side supports multi-touch. It uses just a 16GB solid-state drive, but an SDHC card slot provides most of the bulk storage.

Many of the other specs are similar to those of a current netbook. It outputs at a native 1024×600 display and holds 1GB of DDR3 memory. There’s Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi, with two USB ports, a 1.3-megapixel webcam and a VGA video output.

I have a bunch of flash drives lying around my office and they are all fat drives that block USB ports and need to be plugged into a port with a lot of room around it. This is a huge pain, especially if you are on a netbook or notebook with only a few ports.

LaCie has debuted a new flash drive called the MosKeyto that is tiny and looks more like one of those nano receivers for wireless mice and keyboards than a flash drive. The little drive measures 21 x 16 x 10mm and weighs 10g. You can plug the tiny drive into the USB port and just leave it if you want.

Toshiba’s StorE TV+ media drive looks forward to connecting to your TV, and filling up its 2TB hard drive with shows for your viewing at your leisure. It features 802.11n as well as 10/100 Ethernet and even has a tiny LCD display on the front to make things easier to view.

A wide range of formats are supported by the StorE TV+ including Ogg and Flac audio and MPEG 1, 2, 4, H.264, VC-1 codecs, AVI, WMV, MKV, MOV and MP4 for video playback. Both DivX and XviD are missing from that list for some reason.

HP has announced several new computers today including the Mini 210 series. This machine comes in a variety of colors and has the size and performance that mobile types want when on the go for general computing tasks.

The little netbook has a 10.1-inch screen that is LED backlit and supports 720p resolution. The machine can be optioned with the new Intel dual core N550 Atom processor or the older N455 processor. The machine runs Windows 7 Starter or Home Premium.

Tablets everywhere are bumping shoulders,cameras,bezels and touchscreens as the market gets way too overcrowded, but that isn’t stopping manufacturers from outing more of em. The TEGA V2 tablet stands out a bit as it runs Windows 7 and sports some netbook-like specifications.

Those specs include an Intel Atom N455 processor, up to 4GB of RAM, an SD/SDHC memory card slot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 3G, WiMAX and WiBro. It comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities with a 10-inch multitouch display.

A new trademark filing by Google shows that Google has trademarked the name “Speedbook” under computer hardware. A speedy notebook? A speedy eReader? A book laced with cocaine? It could be any of the above.

It is likely an upcoming tablet or netbook powered by Google’s Chrome OS. We don’t have any actual details on what the Speedbook might be, until Google decides to fess up and tell us. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open.

The folks over at Commodore USA are ready to bring the old school and slam it down on your desktop. The company has announced a new line-up of computers that resemble the original Commodore computers from back in the day.

The best one has to be the one shown above, which is apparently a completely new design, inspired by the original Commodore. Inside this Commodore P64 you’ll find an 2.66 GHz Intel Core I7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 512 MB, 2 TB hard drive, 4GB DDR3 SDRAM, and a BLU RAY drive.

The 3D TVs just keep on coming and Mitsubishi is introducing some 3D TVs that offer an integrated Blu-ray player/recorder and hard drive. Of course, they’re not cheap. They will cost you $5,900, $4,700, and $3,500 for the 55-inch, 46-inch, and 40-inch models respectively.

At least for those prices they will come bundled with a pair of 3D glasses. They should go on sale on October 21st in Japan. Specifications of all three models are identical and include a Full HD LCD panel, LED backlight, Blu-ray burner that can play 3D Blu-ray discs, 1TB hard drive, DIATONE speaker system, USB and HDMI ports and an SD memory card slot.