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.

Looks like Motorola is getting ready to add the QA30 to their Q-Series lineup complete with a sliding QWERTY keypad and un-shocking specs. Some of those specs include: CDMA, 1x-EVDO connectivity, 2.5 inch TFT, Full HTML browser, 2 MP camera, Bluetooth, and MicroSD / MicroSDHC card support, up to 32GB.

If you’re an Alltel customer looking for a cheap QWERTY, this might be for you. The design is more chunky then sleek. If that doesn’t bother you, then go for it. No word on price or availability, but it should be affordable when it hits.

Kenwood is introducing its new and very compact audio system with an amplifier, called the Prodino. It’s compatible with SD or SDHC, miniSD, microSD or microSDHC card, up to 32GB and supports MP3 / WMA / AAC audio files with a maximum output power of 10Wx2. The Kenwood Promino should be available this November and will cost around 45,000 Yen or 360€. There’s also an external iPod docking station that’s compatible with the Promino, which is sold separately at 12,600 Yen or 100€. Pretty nice looking and compact setup.

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.

Many portable electronic devices that are used today store data from office documents to music and video files using SD storage in the form of full-size SD cards and microSD cards. The association that promotes the SD format — the SD Card Association — announced a new standard today for Embedded SD storage.

The new standard would allow manufacturers to embed SD memory inside devices like cameras, phones, and MP3 players. The new specification allows makers to build devices that have internal and external storage using the same specifications.

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.

The storage capacity of SDHC cards is growing greater all the time. I can remember only a few short years ago a 2 GB SDHC card was huge. Today that amount of storage will hold but a few full resolution photos from my DSLR camera. Things are even worse if you try to record HD video from my camcorder that uses SDHC storage.

Kingston announced the perfect SDHC storage card today for users of HD camcorders that record to SDHC cards. The new SDHC Elite Pro card from Kingston has 32 GB of storage. Kingston says 32 GB is enough storage for 6000 full 10-megapixel resolution digital images or over eight hours of full HD video recorded at 6 Mbps.

HD Camcorders are fast becoming the norm and tapes are growing ever rarer for storing digital video. Canon added three new camcorders to its VIXIA HD camcorder line up this week that all have the same 1080p resolution and record to internal memory.

All three camcorders record at 24Mbps bit rate in AVCHD format — the highest bit rate available for the AVCHD format. The VIXIA HF11 Dual Flash memory camcorder can record up to 12 hours of HD video to 32GB of internal flash memory. It also features a SDHC card slot for more recording space when needed.

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.

When Creative first launched its X-Fi technology it was seen in sound cards for computers. The X-Fi sound cards were very good and offered excellent sound for PC gaming and movies. Since the launch of the X-Fi technology creative has rolled X-Fi out to other product types.

The latest product to get the X-Fi treatment is the ZEN line of digital audio players. Creative announced today that the ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN DAP is now available. The player features a 2.5-inch TFT screen with support for 16.7 million colors, SD card slot for memory expansion, a built-in FM tuner with 32 presets and a built-in mic for voice recording.

Camcorders have steadily come down in price to the point where they are nearly disposable. Many low cost camcorders produced today record video digitally in formats that are compatible and easy to upload to services like YouTube online. Samsung unveiled its latest camcorder today aimed at YouTube users called the SC-MX20.

The camcorder features a 680K pixel CCD sensor and can record video at a resolution of 720 x 480 with good color and clarity. The SC-MX20 has a 34x optical zoom lens to let you get up close from afar. Samsung integrates optical image stabilization and Face Detection into the camera as well.

Solid State Drives may well be the future of data storage in the computer industry, but with the high price of flash memory at this time SSDs are not seeing much adaption in the consumer market. So poor is the uptake by consumers for SSDs that Seagate will not even target the consumer market with its SSD line launching in 2009.

Somehow OCZ has got around the cost issue normally associated with SSDs with its latest offering called the Core Series SATA II Solid State Drive. OCZ says that the Core series are the first truly affordable SSDs and that the retail price of 50% less than competing products on the market.

Creative has revealed some snazzy new color options for their ZEN iPod-rival. Behold the eye-catching pink and red versions. These look juicy in bubble gum colors. Other then the color, the PMP is identical to existing ZEN models. So, you’ll get the same 2.5-inch, 320 x 240, 16m color TFT display, choice of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or 32GB flash storage and SD/SDHC expansion.

The ZEN also has an FM radio and microphone for voice recordings, is compatible with multiple audio and video formats (MP3, WMA, AAC (. M4A), WAV (ADPCM), Audible 2,3,4, MJPEG, WMV9, MPED4-SP, DivX 4 / 5 and XviD) and has a photo viewer (JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG & TIFF). It can also handle TIVO-to-go files, from PVR. File transfer is with a USB 2.0 connection. Battery life is about 25hrs audio playback or about 5hrs video. Nothing on price or availability yet, but the red ZEN has been seen on Buy.com, the pink is apparently a Walmart exclusive.

This HTPC has some really nice specs, which include a quad-core Intel processor at 3GHz, 3GB of RAM and NVIDIA’s GeForce 8600GT with HDMI out and PureVideo HD support. Plus, you can get the unit in the color of any automotive paint you want from a basic glossy black to $10k gold-flaked. Nice!

It’s also got a 32GB SSD drive for the OS and a 1TB drive for media storage, although you’ll probably want to upgrade that to 2TB if your media collection is huge. It can also play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Windows Vista Ultimate comes pre-installed and of course card readers and everything else you might expect. Which is good because the base price is just under $6k.

ASUS launched its latest ultraportable notebook today and it’s a looker. The ASUS U2E is an 11-inch notebook weighing only 2.7 pounds and clad in leather. According to ASUS the notebook is hand crafted and designed to appeal to the user’s sense of style.

The U2E claims to be the lightest notebook available with a built-in DVD-RW drive and the system runs on Windows Vista. Since Vista is resource intensive ASUS ships the U2E with 3GB of high-speed DDR2 memory.