Is it too early to start that letter to Santa or did you already start? You might want to add a line item for the UMPC in your life because December will bring Toshiba’s newest 1.8-inch hard drive to market (PDF). Yes it’s physically small, hence the micro-SATA connector, but it’s large in capacity; topping out at 250GB. Two Christmas seasons ago saw Tosh hit 100GB in the same footprint, so the elves have surely been busy!The 5200 RPM MKxx29GSG series handles 120-, 160- or 250GB of your data at up to 707.9 Mbps… not 708, but we can round up, right? Actually, this is a slick method of spin on the data transfer as Toshiba offers it in “megabits” and not “megabytes” per second. Doing the requisite math says that your bits and bytes can move off the drive at up 88.5 MBps, which doesn’t sound nearly as fast, but is still peppy enough. Reads and writes will use 1.2W of power on your portable while the drive idles at 0.4W to help with your battery life. No pricing announced yet, which is why we hope it magically appears under the tree.

Open source has come to the forefront of the mobile space this year in a big way.  Nokia spun off Symbian and created the Symbian Foundation to put the mobile OS into open source to drive development.  Google’s Android made a big splash with its openness designed to drive development by removing obstacles for adoption.  It sounds like the mobile space is getting more open than ever and that things should be rosy for the way forward.  A recent presentation by John Bruggeman, Chief Marketing Officer of Wind River, given at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Berlin paints a radically different picture.

Wind River is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance behind Android and a Core Member of LiMo, the mobile Linux foundation dedicated to the advancement of Linux on mobile devices.  Bruggeman’s presentation carried all the more weight as a result of his company’s heavy involvement of the open source drive and is surprising to say the least.  His talk covered five main points:

1.Linux phones will never be as good as the iPhone

2.The mobile industry has been confused and misled by the Symbian Foundationannouncement

3.Operators insist on hedging their bets

4.Phone manufacturers won’t let go of the past

5.Too many people in the mobile value chain just don’t get it

His talk has generated a lot of buzz including a response by David Wood, a VP at Symbian who takes issue with Bruggeman’s main points, especially point #2 about Symbian.  It definitely would appear that things are heating up over the Symbian Foundation and how they are working with the development community and it will be worth keeping an eye on this as it can have a far-reaching impact on the mobile space.

Drowning in data? Palm is curious how just how much. They won’t throw you a liferaft, but they will enter you for a chance to win one of five Palm Treo handsets. The company is running a survey that ironically gathers information on “information overload”. I took the 25-question survey in just a few short minutes; it’s pretty basic, so it’s not a huge time investment if you want a shot at a free Palm handset. If you’re really interested in this sort of thing, you can even get a free overview of the results. You know… if you’re not already succumbing to information overload.

T-Mobile has shown without a doubt how excited the market is getting over Android with the buzz generated from their press event announcing the G1 phone.  Other handset makers have noted the interest too but a couple of the biggest ones are going to be late to the party it seems.  Samsung and LG, two of the OEMs to jump on the touch phone craze early, are not expected to be producing Android phones until Q3 of 2009 at the earliest.  This would indicate they are either just getting started on the process or are having trouble with carriers to get with their programs, something Mirae Asset Securities believes.  It could be a long dry spell for Android announcements if this is true.

(via engadget)

During one of the Mobilize interviews, I spent a few minutes with Ivan MacDonald, the CEO of Dial2Do. After chatting off-camera about his native country of Ireland and the famed Guinness brewery, we got down to business. The brief interview is below and you’ll hear about “openness”, a common theme we heard at the conference.Today, Dial2Do stands behind that theme and adds two-way voice interaction to e-mail, calendaring and user-created voice commands. This update gives a glimpse of what users and developers will be able to do with the service with an upcoming API release. Now you can listen to or create e-mails and events right through Dial2Do or enable one of the 20 hands-free voice commands for activities like: posting status to a social network, listen to your upcoming Google Calendar events, or hear an RSS feed read to you over the phone.The service is free and works well. I’ve used it in the past for basics like checking e-mail and it came in handy recently when for some reason, my iPhone had no data connection. That’s part of the appeal: you can still be “connected” and productive even when you’re not connected in the traditional sense of data. And any old phone will do. Nice to see to the service become more of a platform that can be leveraged and customized. Dial2Do is currently supported in 19 countries, so you’ll want to check the FAQs to verify support and the Dial2Do phone number in your area.

I wondered if 2009 would be the year of the Solid State Disk but maybe I’m late by a few months. We’re witnessing more and more devices available with an SSD option for starters. All we need now is some low pricing. What’s this? Super Talent now has a 128-GB SSD drive for under $300 smackers? Yikes!It’s the FTM28GO25H model for those in the know and the drive is a 2.5-incher which should fit in bunches of notebooks; possibly even a netbook or two. Super Talent went with a SATA-II interface and the drive supports 100 MB reads and 40 MB writes. Plenty fast enough for the operating system of your choice and far faster than a vastly cheaper SSD modules I’ve seen used before. $299 works out to a reasonable $2.33 per gigabyte. There’s a 64-GB model as well that offers the same specs… other than the capacity and price of course; the FTM64GO25H will run you $179. That just might be worth taking a closer look at since my MSI Wind uses a 2.5-inch drive and my cloud working lets me get away with lower capacity drives. Hmmm….

Is it just me or is the iTunes App Store becoming far too unwieldy to effectively find good applications? Apple does offer lists of the top paid and free apps, but it looks like these are based on download numbers which don’t always equate to high-quality. When I checked just now, the top free app was Vegas Pool Sharks Lite, which had a paltry 2.5 star average rating.Enter Medialets, a company that provides analytics to developers and advertisers, but can also be useful for consumers. The Medialets database tracks the App Store but it offers several search options to help you get more insight as to what you might be downloading or buying. To test the data, I asked for Medialets to return the top free apps and sure enough, the list completely jived with the list I saw in iTunes. That tells me it has accurate data, but how are the search parameters?
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Worried that you might run out of storage space on that cell-phone? SanDisk doesn’t want you losing sleep at night wondering what music you’ll have to move from one memory card to another. That’s why they introduced high-capacity, 16-GB microSD cards today. The small flash memory works with any phone that supports the SDHC or Secure Digital High Capacity, microSD format and retails for just $99.99. Sorry, you’ll have to provide your own music for these cards; they don’t come with any albums included. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.SanDisk also has a 16-GB card for Sony Ericsson devices that support the M2, or Memory Stick Micro form-factor, although these retail for $30 more. Best Buy Mobile will carry the new cards starting in October, while Verizon Wireless stores get them a month later.

GigaOM is thinking about the rumored new product from Apple to replace the Apple TV and offering some ideas for Cupertino to think about.  Some of their desires in a new TV box are:

• TV tuner and set-top PVR to take on TiVo, with streaming and synchronization to Apple’s mobile devices, the way Slingbox does, handled through a more reliable MobileMe
• Controllers with accelerometers and a set-top App Store to rival what’s on the iPhone and iPod Touch
• Videoconferencing-capable features to connect a distributed family via iChat
• Computing features (mail, documents and so on) that make it a decent set-top computer terminal
• Broad support for emerging wireless standards, so it looks like a file server to other devices
• Better integration with stereo systems, tied into the whole family’s iTunes accounts, on par with Roku or the audiophile-friendly Squeezebox
• Good cosmetics so it can mount cleanly to a wall or behind a flatscreen

What do you think?  Jump over and leave your thoughts in the comments.

I was cruising in Best Buy this afternoon to see what trouble I could find and lo and behold was surprised to see this:

This surprised me for a couple of reasons, 1) because it was the only netbook in attendance even though so many are on the market and 2) it is the EEE PC 900XP model with a Celeron processor and not the Atom like all the big boys have.  I had fun playing with it for a bit although the keyboard on this 8.9-inch netbook was too hard to use.  The keys are just too small for me.  The performance wasn’t too shabby with the Celeron but then the internet wasn’t working in the store so I couldn’t try to tax it on the web.  The price was pretty good for the configuration: