Brando has a new cool gadget available. This time, they’re offering up a unique laptop cooler with USB Hub and HDD Slot built in. It measures 300mm x 252mm x 32mm and weighs 504grams. The device is equipped with three USB hubs, a 2.5-inch SATA HDD slot, and two fans to keep your laptop nice and cool.

You can plug in any 2.5 inch SATA hard drive to extend your storage when needed and it supports up to 250GB SATA HDD. Brando’s latest USB Notebook Cooling Pad retails for $33 and is a convenient gift to put under the tree this year.

LaCie’s LaCinema Rugged was announced late last month for those across the ocean, which left us Americans wondering if we would ever get to see it here in the US. Sure enough, here it is, in time for the holidays. LaCie has announced US pricing and availability for the bulked up multimedia drive, and you can get one right now starting at $199.99.

Sizes include 250GB, 320GB and 500GB. It’s rugged in name and rubberized build. Great for the media enthusiast who plans to throw their gear around the room and do all kinds of crazy “Will it still work” tests.

Notebooks are still one of the most hoped for items on many holiday wish lists despite the poor economy. Many who hope to get a notebook as a gift want a small and portable system like the one Toshiba has introduced to the US.

The Toshiba Portege A605 Laptop is a 12.1-inch ultraportable that weighs 3.3 pounds and measures 1.18-inches thick. Battery life is promised to be 6.9 hours and the system carries a retail price of $1399.99. A nice feature on the machine is the Sleep-and-Charge USB port that makes charging your USB devices easier to do.

The SSD offers some nice benefits to the notebook users like increased battery life, faster boot times, and quieter operation. The catch is that at this time SSDs are significantly more expensive than comparable hard drives and the storage capacity of the typical SSD is low.

Intel has jumped into the SSD market with the introduction of a pair of SSDs aimed at consumers. The new SSDs include the X18-M and the X25-M. The X18-M is a 1.8-inch drive and the X25-M is a more traditional 2.5-inch size drive. Intel says that the improved performance of the SSD helps reduce bottlenecks between its CPUs and the storage system. This is the SSD used in the HP system claiming 24-hours of runtime.

Looks like one lucky user got their 120GB Zune a tad early, before it’s formal debut on the 9th. It was sold at a Fry’s in Atlanta for $250. Nice!

Legos aren’t just for play you know. They can also be used to construct and even fix important real life things that you can use. Like this Lego PC case for example. Looking like some shiny black monolith, it’s made entirely out of black Lego bricks. Look how nice and shiny that is. He didn’t just randomly put Lego bricks together either. He used MLCAD to specifically design the PC before building.

The PC is a Mini-ITX form factor that allows for a low power PC inside, which runs a 1.5GHz VIA C7 processor and has a 250GB Seagate hard drive. It’s even got dual gigabite ports on the JetWay motherboard. Very nice. Check out the below video to see how he did it. Yet another real life situation solved by Legos. Have you played with Legos today?

Micron is a big name in the flash memory and storage world. It announced a pair of new solid state drives (SSDs) today called the RealSSD P200 and the RealSSD C200. The two drives are aimed at distinctly different markets and use different technologies.

The RealSSD P200 has the performance, power, and reliability that are needed in the enterprise environment. The P200 uses Micron single-level cell NAND technology and uses a 2.5-inch form factor. Storage capacity for the P200 line ranges from 16GB to 128GB and the drives use the 3Gb/s SATA interface. Maximum read and write speed for the P200 line is 250MB/s. The P200 SSDs are good for up to 2 million hours mean time between failure.

It used to be that a portable hard drive had to be plugged into the wall AC outlet to be able to operate. Over time, some smaller capacity hard drives could be powered by the USB port totally, making them much more portable. Today even some larger capacity portable drives are powered by the USB port.

Memorex announced its new line of portable hard drives today that are completely USB powered. The line is called the Memorex Essential TravelDrive. All of the drives are 2.5-inch and are compatible with both Mac and PC systems and backup software is included with the drives.

D-Link, which first announced its new DSM-210 Internet-enabled picture frame at CES 2008, said today this product is finally ready for retail. The D-Link 10″ Wireless Internet Photo Frame (DSM-210) prices at around $250.

The D-Link 10″ Wireless Internet Photo Frame (DSM-210), besides being your typical digital picture frame, also makes use of a wireless 802.11 connection to load Internet content onto its display. This content, brought over from a company called FrameChannel, draws from over 400 “channels” such as news, weather, sports, trivia, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.

SentrySafe, which is noted for its fire resistant external hard drives, is back in the news with a new 250GB model made in the same vein. The new SentrySafe QA0005 is priced at around $400.

The SentrySafe QA0005, like its predecessors, is designed to withstand select environmental conditions to protect your digital data. It is designed to be waterproof, even when submerged for up to a day, as well as fire resistant up to half-an-hour in 1550-degree temperatures. If it gets that hot, however, we doubt you’ll be donning your fire suit to retrieve it.

Projectors are a great way to share something with lots of people at the same time, be it boring presentations for work or the latest Blu-ray film you have added to your collection. Samsung today announced a pair of new DLP projectors that are aimed at home and office use.

The Samsung A400 projector has a native WXGA resolution of 1280 x 768, a contrast ratio of 2500:1 and 2000 ANSI lumens of brightness. Connectivity options include RGB, HDMI, composite/component, S-video and monitor out. The A400 weighs 9.9 pounds and it includes a theater mode that optimizes color.

For a while now scientific and engineering projects have been using what are basically computer video cards to get significantly more powerful computer systems than are seen when using traditional CPUs. The performance gains come from the fact that each stream processor on modern video cards can be used like an individual processor core. Rather than only four cores in a CPU, the video card offers in the area of 320 processing cores thanks to the high number of stream processors.

AMD announced its latest FireStream processor called the AMD FireStream 9250. The 9250 is designed to accelerate HPC, mainstream and consumer applications. The 9250 fits into a single PCI slot and consumes under 150W of power and AMD says it has a performance per watt efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

Edge Tech has announced a new secure USB flash drive which is both durable and encrypted. It is called the DiskGo Secure Guardian and you’ll find it pricing between around $70 and $250, depending upon memory configuration.

The DiskGo Secure Guardian from Edge Tech is available in 1, 2, 4 and 8GB configurations. It makes use of 256-bit AES hardware encryption to secure data as well as complex password protocols and a function which actually erases the drive’s data after eight failed password attempts.

When it comes to your notebook computer everything is a compromise. The performance of everything from the CPU inside to the hard drives and video cards are a compromise of performance for battery life and vice versa. The trick is to get a good balance of performance while still getting good battery life.

Western Digital announced today that its line of Scorpio Black 2.5-inch SATA notebook HDDs are now available. This line of drives gives high performance with a 7200 RPM rotational speed, but adds some technology to help reduce the battery power needed and increase the runtime of the notebook.

The REDI is a 1 GB mp3 player no doubt geared toward those who can’t figure out computers or are too lazy to go get the music themselves and put it on their mp3 player. They come with about 250 tracks already on them, which would give you about 6 hours of listening time. (There’s bound to be a ton of what you don’t want, just like buying CDs)

It sports a USB mini jack so you can upload your MP3’s should you actually know how to boot up your PC, or if your grandchild comes over to help. Since we don’t all have the same tastes, the REDI comes in a several different flavors. You can get an Ultimate Workout Mix, Golden Classics, Ultimate Rock N’ Roll Collection, the R&B Soul Collection to name a few. They’ll cost you $39.99 each.