Bitmicro announced today plans to launch a new series of 3.5-inch solid state drives. They are promising capacities of 1.6TB (that’s 1600GB) and transfer speeds up to 320MB/second. The new drive, dubbed ‘E-Disc Altima Ultra320 SCSI SSD,’ will also be able to withstand harsh conditions.

Given the prices of current SSDs, you can expect these to cost in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, that means that consumers probably won’t be buying these anytime soon. The drives are aimed at military applications and other high-budget industries.

We’re hoping to see these make it to computers in our lifetime, and are awaiting a 2.5-inch version for laptops as well. We do tend to be pretty optimistic though.

Have you heard of the Microsoft Surface? If not, it’s essentially a replica of an iPhone, only with multi-touch, powered by a full-blown computer, and with a much, much bigger screen. This thing is absolutely awesome - come on, who doesn’t want to be able to play with their coffee table?

Well, due to high consumer demand to bring this toy to their homes, Microsoft has announced that they plan to have Surface available sooner than their original five year prediction.

First, though, the tech giant still has to fulfill orders from the hotel, casino, and retail industries. Seeing as they are already behind, the future does not look too optimistic.

We hope, however, that Microsoft can keep its promise. A Surface might be replacing our coffee tables when it goes on sale and the sooner, the better.

As you may know, the MacBook Air uses specially developed Intel Core 2 Duo chips that are much smaller than regular chips. These processors may soon start appearing in other PCs as well. The chips could potentially be used to create competition for “the world’s thinnest and lightest notebook” (which as far we’re concerned is fantastic news - anything that pushes the market and the industry forward through competition is highly welcomed).

Company names weren’t specified, but as of now there are 2 manufacturers already working the design into their next machine.

We look forward to seeing what kinds of portable and lightweight laptops will come out of this, as they will have a hard time competing with the good looks and classiness of the MacBook Air.

Western Digital (WD) has introduced its new line of My Passport Essential portable hard drives today. The new models are small but still pack a big punch in terms of storage space.

The hard drives weigh in at a paltry 5 ounces and are powered through the USB bus instead of an external power adapter, making these drives ideal on the go.

“The newly designed My Passport Essential drives are the perfect travel-friendly storage device to hold the rich media content generated by higher resolution photos and HD videos and music,” said Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products group.

The drives are available in some stores now, starting at around $180.

Starting mid-February, business customers will be able to order HP’s Compaq dc7800 ultra-slim PC with an SSD drive. We aren’t sure what the drive size will be, but 32GB seems to be a good estimate seeing as the price increase is about $500.

This is the beginning of putting SSDs in our computers, with more and more expected to start showing up soon. Hopefully 2008 will turn out to be the year of the solid state disk, as we can’t wait to put these puppies in our laptops.

Netflix has announced plans to offer a Mac version of their Watch Instantly streaming service sometime this year. Netflix executive Reed Hastings dismissed Apple’s new iTunes rental service:

“You only have 24 hours in which to complete watching the movie [on iTunes], so if you watch over two nights, you pay twice. DVD rentals advantages over VoD are ubiquity of content, ubiquity of DVD players, an early window for new releases, and lower prices.”

Watch Instantly is a Video on Demand service that, for $5 a month, allows subscribers to watch as many movies as they’d like with no other charges or fees. The system is currently heavily dependent on Windows Media copy protection mechanisms, which aren’t available on the Mac.

I think this is fantastic news, seeing as Netflix has a very comprehensive library of films (although only 6,000 are currently available through Watch Instantly, that number is bound to go up as the service really takes off) and being able to access them on a Mac allows a wider audience of people to take advantage of the program. Thank you Netflix!

Photo: http://gizmodo.com

Following hot on the heels of an OS X 10.5.2 update to Leopard announcement, it seems that the Windows Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) might be released on February 15th. Thanks for the (day late) Valentine’s Day present, Microsoft!

Although this is just a rumor without any confirmation by Microsoft (which is simply sticking with a “Q1 release date”), it is believe that the middle of February will be when this update is released, making the 15th a likely choice.

A summary of the (extremely verbose) changelog can be found here.

AMD presents us with their new Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series graphics cards. The 3400 cards are expected to cost between $50 and $65 and the 3600s will go from $80 to $100. With these prices, the new cards will be great for casual gamers and those wanting to watch HD movies on their computers.

Another nifty feature of these cards is the ability to pair them in a Hybrid Crossfire setup on an ATI motherboard, combining the power of the two cards and the onboard graphics chip for a fairly low price.

The cards include support for DirectX 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0, and the DisplayPort video interface.

The introduction of these cards is a good move on AMD’s part. The casual gamer or HD move watcher doesn’t want to shell out $400 on a video card, so a $50 to $100 card will be perfect for a weekend game or two. The graphics won’t be spectacular, but they’ll be much better than an onboard chip and will come with a reasonable price.