JVC has some new ear buds set to launch sometime early in February that employ a little more natural materials than most with the housing made out of real wood. Birch wood, to be exact, was the material of choice for the designers of these $130+ ear buds. After all, real wood wood works well to encase larger speakers so why not use it for really tiny ones too?

The HP-FX500 ear buds don’t skimp on performance either, according to JVC. The buds use hybrid drivers, a damping gel inside to reduce jittering and help with noise cancellation, and they have a sound range from 8Hz up to 25kHz. Also, like most ear buds, they come packaged with a carrying case and multiple sized rubber tips to fit different sized ears.

Yesterday at the LA Auto Show Bob Lutz, GM Vice Chairman, announced November of 2010 as the target date for the production release of the Chevy Volt Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV). This is the most specific time frame heard from GM yet on the concept vehicle originally announced at the Detroit Auto Show in January, and Lutz himself admits that the time frame is aggressive.

To us this seems very aggressive since just the day before we actually drove a Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell which is already going in the hands of real drivers in Project Driveway starting in January, and according to Fuel Cell Commercialization Manager Britta Gross the Equinox Fuel Cell won’t be ready for production before 2010, either. This announcement will however keep Toyota on their toes, as they are also trying to get a battery-powered vehicle off the ground in the near future.

Hitachi today announced another step forward in packing more data into the same sized hard disks with what is now the world’s smallest read-head technology for hard disks. While others (Hitachi themselves included) are starting to turn to solid state drives or hybrid drives with advantages of moving parts, faster response times and less power consumption, Hitachi continues to make advances on the HDD front stating it continues to provide a better capacity to cost ratio than other technologies.

Today Seagate took the wraps off of their first hybrid notebook hard drive featuring a combination of standard hard drive storage and Flash memory. The Momentus 5400 PSD features only a 5400 rpm spindle but promises faster system response times along with extended notebook battery life and better storage reliability. We’ve seen hybrid drives like these in the past with Samsung and Hitachi, and improved speed and efficiency through this type of storage combo is likely to be the standard in coming years.

The 2.5 inch drive utilizes 256MB of Flash-based memory for storing data that’s frequently accessed providing a quicker responses and through this also requires less drive disk access, cutting the power consumption of the drive more than in half. Having the additional quick-access memory also aids in faster OS boot times according to the company.

In a world where your cell phone can be a camera, mp3 player, portable video device, and access the web you most definitely need a lighter that can be used to secretly store your personal data. Combining two of my favorite things, information and fire (the true key to the modern world), the memlite is a hybrid lighter and USB flash drive that would even make Q himself jealous.

The memlite will eventually come in five colors (black, grey, blue, red and green) and soon will have a capacity of 4GB… more than enough room …

Today Hitachi has announced two new Blu-ray disc camcorders which they are calling the worlds first camcorders that can record high-definition video to Blu-ray. Both camcorders have the ability to record full high-definition video directly to a single-side, single-layer Blu-ray disc giving up to one hour of 1920×1080 resolution video on the disc.

The DZ-BD7H model is actually a “hybrid” camcorder with the ability to record the high-definition video to either the Blu-ray disc or an internal 30GB hard drive which can hold up to four hours of the 1920×1080 high-def video. Once recorded onto …

Samsung has offered up some specs on their lineup of hybrid hard drives. Arguably the heart of any computer, the new drive is designed to consume less power than traditional HDDs. The hybrids use a buffer of non-volatile flash memory to cache data, improving accessing speed and increasing the boot speed. Additionally, since the drive only needs to spin for less than a minute every hour, the power consumption for a hybrid is 10-15% less than a traditional HDD.

The Samsung hybrid MH80 HDDs will be available in storage sizes of 80 GB, 120 GB …

US Auto manufacturers like Ford and GM are hoping hi-tech innovations will put sales into high gear. Ford recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to create Sync, a technology built into Ford vehicles that will allow the interface of devices like mobile phones and iPods to the automobiles sound system.

GM unveiled an all electric car that draws power from an onboard lithium-ion battery (just like an iPod!). GM calls this concept car “Volt.” GM tried and failed once before with its EV1 hybrid car. GM has improved on the …

Not long after Seagate announced its disc level security encryption, Hitachi was right behind them unveiling new 2.5 inch notebook drives for 2007 that have greater capacities, require less power due to flash memory utilization, and have encryption security right on the disk.

The encryption, similar to what is being done with disk level encryption by Seagate, happens right on the disk which allows it to be “bound” with a device and helps avoid having data stolen or lost since it encrypted at the disk level and doesn’t need an application to implement …