The iPhone is one of the most desired smartphones on the planet and is at the top of the sales charts for all phones in the US. The latest phone to take aim at the iPhone has been announced by Nokia. As you expect the phone has a touchscreen and a few features that iPhone owners will wish they had.

The touchscreen is 3.5-inches and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio. Under the touchscreen is a slide out QWERTY keyboard for typing email and text messages on the go. The N97 has 32GB of onboard memory and a microSD card slot.

Energy Sistem released the 4040 Touch portable media player. It comes with some high-end features like a 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen, 16GB of storage, a microSD card slot, built-in microphone, FM tuner, and supports most audio and video file formats.

The Energy Sistem 4040 Touch is priced at €120. The company has also released the 5020 and 5021, which have no touchscreen and take the storage down to 4GB. These lower-end PMPs are priced at about €85.

Even if you aren’t crazy enough to brave the stores on Black Friday, you can still save some money online with special deals for the biggest shopping day of the year. Many of the big computer makers and retailers are offering some of their deals online as well as in stores.

Dell is offering some nice savings on its Mini 9 netbook. The Inspiron Mini 9 running Ubuntu Linux is selling for $299 today. The price includes 512MB of RAM, 8.9-inch LED backlit LCD, 4GB SSD, and more. That price is a $50 discount from normal.

The LG Incite is available now at AT&T. It’s not bad looking. The 3G Windows mobile phone comes with a 3-inch touchscreen with a full virtual keyboard and haptic feedback. Someother features include: aGPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3.0-megapixel camera, and a microSD slot (up to 16GB.)

The LG Incite runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 and offers Windows Media Player 10. The Incite could be considered the first full-fledged LG smartphone in the States. It’s priced at $199.99 with 2-year contract.

Microsoft will announce price cuts across the board for its flash Zunes tomorrow. Good news if you are bargain shopping. hey aren’t Earth shattering deals, but every bit helps right? The 4GB model will drop to $100, the 8GB will go for $140 and 16GB for $180. The price drops make them all cheaper than the equivalent iPod nanos.

Sprint finally released the new HTC Touch Pro smartphone. Those who have been waiting can purchase the handset online in the next few days. It will be available in Sprint stores beginning on November 2nd, 2008 for $299.99. That’s after a $100 mail-in rebate. The HTC Touch Pro features a high resolution touchscreen display, sliding QWERTY keyboard, and is expandable to 16GB via SD card, with Video Out to display PowerPoint presentations or media files should you wear a tie and have need of such a thing.

In most of the spy movies I have seen, there are always some sort of secret documents that need to be photographed. When 007 needs to take pictures of secret files he doesn’t whip out a massive DSLR, he whips out a tiny spy camera like the Minox Digital SpyCam.

The tiny camera measures 3 3/8-inch x 1 3.16-inch x 7/8-inch and boasts a 5-megapixel resolution. Weight for the camera is a mere 2.1 ounces. Internal memory for the camera is 128MB and it accepts memory cards up to 16GB. The exact format of memory card used is a microSD card.

Music phones and smartphones are two of the biggest categories of handsets today. Music fans can get one device that lets them make and receive phone calls while listening to music. Without a phone that can play music, users end up needing to carry a MP3 player and a mobile phone. Finding a place to stuff an extra gadget can be a big problem for some users.

The LG Rhythm is an interesting phone that features a built-in FM transmitter that can send music playing on the phone to a FM radio up to ten feet away. That means in your car you can listen to music from the phone on your car audio system without resorting to accessories. The handset has an integrated 3.5mm headphone jack and can change between music and phone calls automatically.

The Shiro SQ-S MP3 player is one the finalists for the HKEIA Award for Outstanding Innovation & Technology Products. It features a 1.8″ 65K color LCD display that will display all the usual stuff like track lists, Images, Video, eBooks and supports MP3/ WMA/ WAV/ FLAC/ APE/ OGG music formats. You’ll even get an integrated FM tuner and voice recorder, which will let you record the song you hear right from the station.

The player also sports 16GB of built-in memory, and will play music for up to 35 hours or 7 hours of video. The interesting thing here is the Solar cell in the back of the player. It allows for more charging, around 4 hours, giving you nearly unlimited music time. As long as you have sun anyway. The player will be available in three flavors. Silver/ Red/ Blue, and also four different patterns in its circular keypad. No word on price or availability.

Mahjong tiles can be considered an art form, just like the game and now you can get in on the action with a Mahjong USB flash drive. It’s called the MahjongDisk and it’s a handcrafted USB flash drive made to look like three Mahjong tiles stacked together.

Thing is at $400 you might as well just make your own. The $400 drive is constructed from wood and available in 8GB or 16GB capacities. The Lan-Xue model will retail for another $100 compare to the Li-Shui, and both use materials found in classic Chinese furniture. Read and write speeds have been rated at 18MB/s and 15MB/s. The price includes getting them engraved with whatever you like, with something like, “I paid $400 and all I got was this lousy USB flash drive”.

When it comes to our mobile devices we all want more, more features, more performance, more speed, and especially more storage. Music phones today can hold thousands of songs, but mobile users are always on the lookout for more storage space.

SanDisk announced the largest capacity microSD and M2 format memory card you can get. Both formants are now available in 16GB capacities. The cards require mobile phones and MP3 players that support microSDHC or M2 formats.

The Samsung Haptic 2 mobile phone is currently available in 4GB and 16GB flavors. The mobile phone features a 3.2-Inch LCD touch screen, DMB, e-dictionary, Bluetooth, and 5MP camera. The handset also comes with a new User Interface that lets users create their own vibration mode to be used for either good or evil, and create various personal screen designs with 50 icons. The Samsung Haptic 2 is priced between €480 and €550.

I have talked about the drawbacks of SSDs before, including the high price of the typical SSD and the lower storage capacity among others. The price for your average SSD is starting to come down and new technology is bringing us higher capacities and better performance. Toshiba introduce a new SSD this week that helps performance and capacity concerns.

The Toshiba 256GB SSD uses multi-level cell technology for faster performance. The 256GB drive uses the industry standard 2.5-inch form factor. MLC technology allows the SSD to have read speeds of 120Mbps and write speeds of 70Mbps.

The eco minded geek is always on the lookout for the next environmentally friendly gadget. The Recycle USB flash drive is all Mother Nature, fit for eco geeks and hippies who have given in to using tech and washing occasionally.

The entire exterior case is made up of recycled newspaper and has a storage capacity of 512MB - 16GB. I’m confused though. Does this mean it’s okay to just throw it in the forest when you’re done with it or will it choke small furry creatures? Either way, it’s not my concern after that. Still, I think they could have given it some style while making it Earth-friendly. I mean it looks like a paint chip off the wall.

Today SanDisk has likely pleased at least a few more professionals in the digital photography and videography world with the introduction of the new 32GB Extreme III CF card. Not only have they doubled the capacity of the largest CompactFlash card SanDisk previously had available, but they’ve also bumped the read/write speed up from 20 MB/second to 30 MB/second with this new item.

Anyone that heavily uses memory cards for digital cameras or video cameras can appreciate how nice it is to have more storage in a single card, and upping the transfer rate by 50% makes the decision to get the larger 32GB CF card just that much easier. Sure you can generally get an SDHC card for a little less money and they are a little bit smaller, but the transfer rate is what will make a difference. The Kingston 32GB SDHC card for example can hold just as much, but moving the card’s entire capacity of data is the difference between about 18 minutes for the SanDisk CF and 2.2 hours for the Kingston SDHC.