Rugged Tablet PC developer MobileDemand unveiled today its latest Tablet PC designed for harsher environments. It is called the MobileDemand xTablet T8700 and it retails starting at around $3,800.

The MobileDemand xTablet T8700, like other rugged Tablet PCs, is created in mind for professions like construction and delivery. It offers up “military-rated” ruggedness and is capable of supporting Windows Vista. It can reportedly withstand temperatures of -4°F to +122°F, among other things.

When the lights flicker and the circuit breaker is ready to flip, you know someone in the house is gaming on their 3-way NVIDIA SLI enabled PC. You can help keep the power on though by getting them one of these new Corsair HX1000W power supplies, priced at around $280.

Lenovo this week rolled out an extremely thin notebook PC which is described as being lightweight and fully functional. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is priced at around $2,800 starting.

Samsung is trying to dispel some concerns consumers are having about using flash-based solid-state drives in their computers, saying they are more reliable that a lot of people think. Sure, having a 64GB SSD in your notebook at first sounds like a pretty good idea. Faster boot times, no moving parts to wear out, but then the price hits you. Adding that SSD can increase the overall price of the computer by as much as $900. Also, in terms of computing, a maximum 100,000 write cycles just doesn’t seem like that much.

Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, is assuring us that 100,000 write cycles is actually quite a bit. He states that the SSD can write 100,000 times to each and every memory cell, and the drive controller evens out the cells that get written to with “wear leveling”. As an example, Yang says that a 64GB SSD could be fully erased and filled again with data every hour and it would still last years before failing. He also said the failure would then likely come from the controller, not the memory cells. He also expects the price of SSDs to drop around 40 percent each year, making this alternative more affordable.

Larger capacity solid-state drives will be on their way soon from SanDisk. That’s because SanDisk and Toshiba are working together on a new 43-nanometer manufacturing process which will give us SSDs with the same capacity as those of today’s typical 2.5″ hard drives.

Flash memory is the natural replacement for hard drives in ultra-small notebooks like the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC, because they use less power, generate less heat, and have faster access times than hard drives. The only downside is that as the Gbs go up the cost will get higher.

Business and education technology company Tangent has begun selling through computer manufacturer Asus a mini-notebook computer. It is called the Tangent ePC and pricing starts at around $300.

The Tangent ePC, which looks like it will sport the Asus logo on the cover, comes in a variety of colors and incorporates a seven-inch screen. Dimensions are on the small size, with the four models in this line up measuring 8.86- x 6.3 x 0.79-inches and weighing just over two pounds. These are not laptops designed for heavy business use but rather casual applications like Web browsing and word processing.

HP unveiled today a new energy efficient business focused desktop computer it says is the industry’s first to offer a solid state hard drive. It’s called the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC and pricing begins at around $1,260.

The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC features a solid state hard drive as part of its configuration options. This drive provides quicker access to data and has no moving parts, eliminating quick wear out. This desktop computer is also designed to meet EPAT Gold environmental requirements.

Puget Systems today announced the release of the Deluge, the companies most aggressive gaming rig to date. The systems can be highly customized but all of these liquid cooled systems feature some of the fastest and most powerful components available, including nVidia’s 780i triple-SLI, overclocked Intel 45nm Penryn processors and OCZ DDR2 heatpipe memory. Optional BigFoot Networks’ KillerNIC and MTron Solid State drives are also available.

Puget’s goal was to create an intense gaming system that did not require gamers to pay through the nose to get own, and the system they’ve come up with looks pretty good. The company is offering three different Deluge-i systems to start from with pricing starting at around $2600 and with options can extend to well over $10k. All can be tailored to your own specs but come standard with the following:

It looks like those MacBook Air rumors were really not too far off. Today Steve Jobs announced the latest addition to the MacBook lineup at MacWorld in San Francisco, touting it as the thinnest notebook in the world. The MacBook Air measures a mere 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, and it only gets as thick as 0.76 inches at the hinged end.

The Air Mac will start shipping in about two weeks with a retail price of $1,799, and comes with the following features:

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.

Lenovo is stepping into the consumer PC market with a pre-CES announcement yesterday about its new line of “Idea” notebook and desktop PCs. These models will consist of a variety of consumer-oriented IdeaPad notebooks and IdeaCentre desktops. You can expect to see some of these models hitting retail outlets in the next few months.

Lenovo seems to be coming out of the gate first with its IdeaPad notebooks. Three models will initially fill in this line up - the 17-inch widescreen IdeaPad Y710, the 15.4-inch widescreen IdeaPad Y510 and the ultraportable 11-inch widescreen ideaPad U110. Features which will be integrated across the line, according to Lenovo, include face recognition for logging into the notebook, enhanced multimedia experiences and a “distinctive look and design.”

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.

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.

Sanyo has launched the new Xacti DMX-HD700, solid state based high-def camcorder today touted by the company as the world’s “smallest and lightest” 720p camcorder. It has the ability to record 720p video for as long as two continuous hours on the batteries and can store up to 2 hours and 46 minutes of full-resolution video in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format on an 8GB SDHC card.

The new Xacti and can also take 7.1 megapixal still photos through the 5x optical zoom lens and can track and focus on up to 12 faces with its Face Chaser feature. It even has a decent sized viewer for the size of the camera with a 2.7-inch LCD display that flips open. It also has an HDMI output built-in and comes bundled with Adobe’s Premiere Elements 3 to get you ready to take and edit high-def videos right out of the box. It’s expected to be in stores by the end of October and comes in colors of brown, red and silver for a very reasonable $600.

In a seemingly surprising twist, Sun Microsystems has announced that it will start building servers with its once-rival Microsoft Windows Operating system pre-installed. According to a statement by the company, they will start installing Windows Server 2003 on its servers that run Intel 64-bit processors and they will be available for purchase in about three months.

Due to the history Microsoft and Sun share of being bitter rivals this news comes as a surprise to many, although in reality Sun seems to have changed its …