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 …

Samsung Electronics is marching on with its solid state drives (SSD) today by announcing 64GB models are now shipping. These are reportedly immediately available in Dell and Alienware consumer notebooks.

Samsung said “Alienware will provide a 128GB SSD configuration, by offering dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 array, as well as a single 64GB SSD combined with a large capacity 200GB 7200RPM drive, available on the powerful Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook. Dell is offering the SSD drive on its premium XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook, and expects to make it available across additional XPS systems, as well as Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations later this year.”

Dell is bringing some new power to its lineup of Precision mobile workstation computers today. The computer manufacturer announced the Precision M6300, available now for a base configuration price of $2,070.

The Dell Precision M6300 borders on being a desktop replacement model, sporting a 17-inch wide aspect WXGA+ display. It’s powered by 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme Edition processors up to the X7900 and combined with NVIDIA Quadro FX1600M OpenGL discrete graphics. You also get up to 4GB of RAM and your choice of hard drives, including solid state and encrypted.

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 …

Buffalo has a new solid state drive out pushing the SSD storage capacity to as large as 56GB. This drive keeps small in stature however with dimensions of only 57mm x 89mm x 14mm and a weight of only 60 grams. It’s ready for the real world with shock resistance and is small enough to fit in your pocket giving you 56GB of easy-access storage on the go.

The Buffalo SHD-UH comes in different capacities ranging from 16GB up to the 56GB version and getting SSD in this capacity apparently is still …

We’ve seen some solid state drives announced but today Samsung is the company that was able to bring a 1.8″ 64GB solid state drive into mass production. The SSD is intended for use in UMPC’s, notebooks and other portable devices as a smaller, faster, lightweight replacement to traditional hard drives.

Drives using Flash-based memory promises to provide faster boot times to be quicker at pulling up applications since it can access the data faster. It also boasts a lower battery consumption compared to devices with spinning hard drives.

Samsung …

Coming toward the end of this month is a new hifi CD player from Opera Audio called the Forbidden City Ping featuring a solid-state 100 watt 2-channel amplifier, and a LED display and an AM/FM tuner. They’ve designed a linear style player with an interesting color pattern that comes in red or gray that almost looks like peg-board.

The interesting part about this hifi CD player/amplifier is it’s a USB 1.1 connection to your computer. Using a SpAct interface through USB the Ping player can play music on you computer …

Today Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, took their first crack at a new product line of solid state drives based on Nand flash memory.

The new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive is intended to be used in the place of traditional hard drives offering a more cost-effective and high-performance storage solution. The Nand flash-based drives can offer quicker boot times and faster data access while using less power in systems such as PC’s, routers and gaming devices. Aside from just being able to improve boot …

A Dell PC loaded with the Linux operating system may be a viable option in the near future, according to a statement posted Friday on the company’s Web site.

Dell’s decision to go with a Linux option is undoubtedly due to the overwhelming popularity of a suggestion on Dell’s new IdeaStorm website. Ideastorm is a community website where Dell customers can submit feedback and offer suggestions on how to improve the overall Dell experience including products, services, and operations.

The popular suggestion was to “Offer the 3 top free …

Moore’s Law seems in jeopardy with some recent memory design innovations by IBM. The new design triples the amount of memory on a microprocessor and marks the fastest access times ever recorded with eDRAM (pictured).

The new eDRAM requires about one-third the space of prior designs and vastly improves microprocessor performance in multi-core designs, graphics for gaming, and networking performance. The new memory also has significantly lower power requirements – needing only one-fifth the standby power of conventional SRAM.

SRAM or Static RAM is a fast volatile memory and …

Crunchgear got a tip yesterday that a Zune Phone from Microsoft is in the works, and as far as tips go they seem to think this is a pretty solid one. According to the tip, executives from Microsoft are currently working out details of the product and its release.

The gadget site states a number of “known” details about the rumored Zune Phone and it’s launch. First, the new mobile phone would be a smart device that interfaces with the existing Zune product but will not run Windows Mobile, …