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.

Most geeks can understand the allure of a SSD drive with much faster data access, read and write speeds. What most geeks can’t get behind is the huge price premium you pay for the SSD when compared to a traditional hard drive and the amount of storage space you give up.

Today a typical hard drives in a computer are at least 80GB, even in tiny ultra portable systems. If you opt for a SSD you typically get 32MB, though some larger SSD drives are available like the 832 GB BiTMICRO SSD from CES 2008.

Today Apple announced the release of a new 16GB iPhone giving double the storage capacity in the device. The Apple store was down for a while this morning, just in the U.S., which especially on a Tuesday indicates the company had something new coming. When the site came back up the Apple store now shows two models, one with the original 8GB capacity for $399 and a new 16GB iPhone model for $499. All the specs aside from the increased storage capacity appear to be the same, and no, there was no 3G added into the 16GB model.

In addition to the iPhone getting some more storage, the iPod touch also saw an increase in its capacity to store music, pictures and video with Apple also announcing a 32GB version today as well. The 32GB iPod touch was added to the Apple store this morning retailing for $499, along with the existing 16GB model priced at $399 and the 8GB model going for $299.

NextoDi brought a couple of new products to the PMA show in Las Vegas this year with one of them being an upgraded media storage device with support for eSATA drives and just about every media card you can think of. Until you get your hands on a few 32GB media cards the Nexto Extreme ND2700 works well for transferring and storing data from the smaller media in your digital camera and camcorder while on the go.

The ND2700 also uses NextoDI’s X-Copy technology delivering backup speeds as fast as 40 seconds for 1GB. The USB connection makes transferring data even easier by connecting to your camera directly without having to remove the media card. A sampling of those media cards supported by the Nexto Extreme include CF, SD, SDHC, MMC and a whole array of Memory Sticks. NextoDI didn’t have any information quite yet on pricing or availability.

SanDisk upped their available SDHC card capacity today by putting 32GB of flash memory in the latest to the line of Ultra II SDHC cards. This new 32GB flash card reads and writes at 15MB/second, which is a nice increase from the 10MB/second found previously from the Ultra II’s.

This card to date is the largest flash memory card put out by SanDisk and brings them in line with the most capacity available in an SDHC card in the industry. This kind of storage can put as much as 4 hours of 1536 kbps MPEG-4 video or around 8,000 digital photos on a card not much larger than your thumbnail.

According to a press release, BiTMICRO will be amazing some people for sure, with their new 2.5-inch solid-state drive with an amazing 832GB of NAND flash. The 3Gb SATA drive is a new addition to their E-Disk Altima line, and uses a technology they are calling multi-level cell (or MLC) memory, which doubles the number of bits stored per memory cell when compared with single-level cell (SLC) NAND. Apparently this increases data density and allows them to keep the price low.

Looks like they will be shipping in the 3rd quarter of 2008. That’s when we should see capacities ranging from 32GB all the way up to 832GB.

One common compliant of flash-based portable media players is they don’t have enough storage for all of your media files. Creative is today challenging that issue by globally releasing a new 32GB version of its Zen player. It will price for around $330.

This 32GB Zen from Creative will reportedly be the world’s first flash memory based PMP of this size. Creative says it will be capable of holding up to 8,000 songs, 110 hours of video or thousands of photos. It offers up a 2.5-inch color screen for viewing and will let you get up to 30 hours of music or 5 hours of video playback before needing a recharge.

Mitron, a South Korean developer of Solid State Drive (SSD) products, announced today the introduction of a new SSD for the consumer market. It is called the Mtron SSD MOBI and it will price at around $650.

The Mtron SSD MOBI is geared towards the likes of high end gamers and video graphic artists. It delivers 32GB of storage, a maximum reading speed of 100 MB per second, maximum writing speed of 80 MB per second and random access time of 0.1 ms. The 2.5-inch body which hosts all of this is outfitted with a Serial ATA interface for replacing that hard drive in your laptop or desktop computer.

Today Alienware announced that they will start selling notebooks that utilize Solid State Drives (SSD) to improve performance through the drives faster read and write speeds. The SSD drives will be offered in the Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700 and Area-51 m5550 notebooks.

In addition to getting your notebook with the fast flashed-based storage, two of the notebooks will also offer dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The company is even offering a dual drive configuration that combines a 32GB SSD drive for faster booting and running applications along with a …

Today SanDisk, the original inventor of flash memory cards, has introduced a 4GB microSDHC card. The significance of this release lies in the fact that this microSD card is the largest capacity to date for the smallest model of removable flash memory cards.

The 4GB capacity of the microSD also kicks it the tiny memory card into the microSDHC realm, defined by a new SD 2.00 specification that applies to any microSD card larger than 2GB. The new specification is required for capacities from 4GB to 32GB by the …

Sandisk recently announced that they along with Toshiba are planning on shipping their next generation of NAND flash memory in the first quarter of 2007 as they begin a transition in production at one of their joint wafer fabrication plants. The transition will mark the beginning of producing 56 nanometer multi-level cell flash memory chips from the previous 70 nanometer production. This will create the industry’s highest available density in a single chip MLC NAND flash memory.

This release comes after a number of recent announcements from …

SanDisk announced today the launch of a 32 gigabyte, 1.8″ solid state drive as a drop-in replacement for existing notebook drives.

The new replacement drive uses non-volatile memory instead of a spinning disk and mechanical head to read and write data. Due to this, the SanDisk drive can offer very competitive read and write speeds without having to spin-up or seek files, with a fraction of the power consumption of a traditional hard drive with moving parts. Lower power consumption can be an important factor for those using notebooks on the …