HTC Offers Touch Cruise Phone With Footprints Geotagging

HTC has announced the new Touch Cruise, its latest personal navigation handset with inbuilt GPS. Touch Cruise boasts a new, more compact design and a host of new capabilities to offer a richer and more intuitive experience in one powerful package.

It offers HTC Footprints, an application experience that enables people to permanently chronicle their special moments by capturing a digital postcard on their phone. Footprints identifies each postcard with its specific GPS co-ordinates, and auto-names each postcard with its general location or area.

“Just as we have seen GPS technology transform how people navigate to new places, we are now seeing location-based applications like HTC Footprints changing how we interact and carry our memories,” said Peter Chou, President and CEO, HTC Corporation.

The HTC Touch Cruise boasts a compact and sleek design with a 2.8 inch QVGA display. It provides fingertip access to phone, contacts, email, messaging, calendar and GPS applications. It also features Wi-Fi b/g and A-GPS, together with Bluetooth 2.0 and a 3.2-megapixel fixed-focus camera.

The HTC Touch Cruise is also an advanced in-car navigation system with an easy-to-use, one-touch interface that provides seamless turn-by-turn directions.

HTC says the Touch Cruise will be available across all major global markets in spring 2009.

Transcend Offers Stylish 1.8” SSD18M Solid State Drive

Transcend has announced SSD18M, the stylish new 1.8-inch portable solid state drive (SSD). The SSD18M presents fashionable good looks with its chic gloss diamond pattern fascia and offers high-capacity mobile storage convenience.

The SSD18M features both eSATA as well as USB 2.0 connection interface. It is made of reliable NAND flash memory that contains no moving parts, thus eliminating the possibility of mechanical failure resulting from vibration and shock. It also provides substantial weight savings and reduced power consumption.

Its new high-speed eSATA interface provides a maximum read speed of 90MB/s and write speeds of 50MB/s, while its USB2.0 interface assures maximum compatibility with all types of notebook and desktop PCs.

Available in capacities of 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, the Transcend SSD18M portable solid state drives are backed by a two-year warranty.

Acer Introduces 23-Inch Display with Sensor Touch

Acer has announced the slick new Acer H233H 23-inch widescreen display and Aspire X1700, the newest member in the desktop PC line.

The Acer H233H 23-inch display offers cinematic quality with sleek styling. It boasts a 16:9 aspect ratio for maximum HD support, a high contrast ratio and fast response time. The display also features SensorTouch technology, a touch-sensing solution with effortless settings for one-touch convenience.

It features a 1920x1080 resolution, 40,000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness and a 5ms response time. It also comes with two premium speakers for high-performance sound.

The small form factor (SFF) PC Aspire X1700 boasts an Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor E2200 and 4GB DDR2 memory, for extremely fast system response. The integrated NVIDIA GeForce graphics enhance multimedia performance with support for the latest DirectX games. It offers 640GB SATA II hard drive to store a vast library of music, movies and games. It also features nine USB 2.0 ports and a multi-in-one card reader.

The Acer H233H 23-inch LCD display is available now for a MSRP of $229.99, while the Acer Aspire X1700-U3700A is available for a MSRP of $479.99 in the United States.

OCZ Introduces New Apex Series 2.5” SSDs

OCZ has unveiled the Apex SATA II 2.5” Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, its midrange offering for enthusiasts, system builders, and mainstream computer users demanding the latest technology.

OCZ says the Apex Series SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF), thus ensuring the reliability. The SSDs offers read speed up to 230 MB/sec and write speed up to 160 MB/sec.

“As the adoption of SSD drives continues to ramp, it is our goal to enable everyday consumers to take advantage of the benefits of solid state drives,” said Eugene Chang, Director of Product Management at OCZ Technology Group. “The new Apex Series is positioned at the center of our lineup and features an updated controller and internal RAID design to deliver superior performance to mainstream consumers at a very aggressive price.”

The Apex series SSD drives are available in storage capacities of 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB. Though the OCZ terms the series as ‘affordable midrange offering’, the price have not yet been announced.