Listen up all you Palm Treo Pro hopefuls, your pre-order unit is now shipping with Palm's on-line store showing in stock availability. At least one tipster received a confirmation email saying his unlocked, $549 obsidian-black Treo is in the mail. Hell, Palm even did him a solid and expedited the order overnight instead of the 6-10 day standard shipment originally selected. Good on ya Palm.

[Thanks, Matt B.]

Forget everything you know about perspective, Samsung's Haptic 2 is clearly one huge-ass handset. Amazing that the jumbo-handed product waif on the left can even hoist the beast without so much as a grimace. Otherwise, Samsung's newest fullscreen device looks every bit the hot Korean cousin to the i900 Omnia. The Haptic 2 followup to the original Haptic features DMB television, 4GB (SCH-W550 or SPH-W5500, about $600) or 16GB (SCH-W555, about $690) of storage, integrated mobile banking, and improved (more sensitive) 3.2-inch touchscreen and an updated TouchWiz UI now sporting 50 widget applications (up from 15) and user defined vibration tones -- whoa, better beef up security for the Korean launch Sammy.

[Via Telecoms Korea]

October 2nd: mark it down 'cause Reuters says that's the date that Nokia will launch its Nokia Tube -- aka, 5800 XpressMusic. According to a pair of industry sources, Nokia will launch the much anticipated, long overdue, S60 touchscreen device at a media and analyst event in London -- exactly as Pocket-lint's source told us earlier. All that's left now is for the invites to be distributed.

If you can't get your goods into China via the front door, there's always the back. Apple is now selling its iPhone 3G unlocked via its on-line Apple Store in Hong Kong. The 8GB model sells for HK$5,500 (about US$694) or HK$6,200 (about $797) for the 16 gigger. Already available since July 11th with a local Hutchison Telecommunications contract, this is the first time that Apple has sold its device unlocked in Hong Kong:
Unfortunately for the 1 billion mainland Chinese, the terms and conditions limit sales to those in Hong Kong only -- not that the gray market cares about T&Cs. It'll be interesting to see if Apple extends the unlocking more broadly (presumably as exclusivity deals expire) or if this is strictly a local phenomena, perhaps in direct response to having its WiFi and the imperialistic 3G gutted from handsets sold under Apple's rumored China Mobile deal.

[Via PC World, thanks Twins N]

Get your flash here, red hot flash memory. Toshiba is now sampling its new 256GB SSD with a 120MB max read and 70MBps write via 3.0Gbps SATA interface -- not the fastest consumer SSD but not bad. This 2.5-inch slab measures just 3.0-mm thick and targets laptops looking to shed the 9.5-mm constraint presented by standard hard disks. Like Samsung, Tosh also announced new 8GB, 16GB and 32GB SATA flash modules aimed directly at the booming netbook market with speeds topping-out at 80MBps for reads and 50MBps for writes. All the drives feature MLC-based NAND which accounts for the less-than blazing SSD speeds. On the other hand, that should help keep the costs low when these things ship in quantity later this year.

Look National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, we understand this is your first walking, bi-pedal robot -- but why the peel-away face? Just slap in some big manga eyes and button-mouth and we might be able to sleep at night. But no, you show up at the Taipei International Invention Show with this creepoid, capable of singing via synthesizer and walking 2-meters in a straight line -- presumably in preparation to celebrate our demise.

Thought that Atom CPU shortage a few months back was just posturing by Intel? Take a look at the top 10 list of best selling "Laptop Computers" over at Amazon. All but one laptop (the 13.3-inch MacBook) is a netbook and 8 of the 10 devices are powered by Intel's 1.6GHz Atom processor. Guess this makes it official: the age of the netbook has indeed, arrived.

[Via MacRumors and Cult of Mac]

Shhh, keep this on the down low: SanDisk's 16GB microSDHC card is now available for purchase -- the first to reach that capacity. At the moment, it's only been spotted at a few on-line shops in the UK for round-about £45 with VAT (about $70 pre-tax in the US). Exactly what you need for your new T-Mobile G1. Hey Sandisk, you want to chime in and make this official or what?

[Thanks, L.Rawlins]

Ok, it's not by much, but world's biggest is world's biggest especially notable when it comes in a package this small. Toshiba just busted up its own record for 1.8-inch drive capacity with this new 250GB MKxx29GSG series disk spinning at 5,400rpm -- the previous 240GB 1.8-incher announced a few weeks ago is stuck with a slower PATA interface more suitable to portable audio players. That makes this 8.0-mm thick, 3Gbps SATA hard drive ideal for ultra-slim, ultra-portable laptops requiring snappy (and cheap compared to an equivalent capacity SSD) data access by your applications. At least it will be when it begins mass production in November.

[Via Impress]

To put Casio's achievement into perspective, those 7-inch PMPs and UMPCs generally equipped with 800 x 480 LCDs are now kicking the dirt in embarrassment at being outdone by the pixel density of Casio's new 2-inch display. Using a proprietary Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT (HAST) LCD, Casio achieves a 960 x 540 pixel resolution resulting in 546 pixels per inch supporting 16.8 million colors -- hoozah! Although not announced, we'll undoubtedly see these in future NTT DoCoMo superphones just as soon as these displays hit mass production.

[Via Akihabara News]

If you like the Eee PC 901 then you're going to love this. ASUS just announced an integrated HSUPA option for its 8.9-inch netbook. When coupled with that 7.5-hour (rated) 6-cell battery you'll have ample time to try and locate a carrier "in many destinations around the world" capable of delivering 7.2Mbps down and 2Mbps up -- ASUS doesn't say but we're sure it'll step down to older WWAN coverage as required. Available in October (just missing the September launch rumor) for an undisclosed price on undisclosed frequencies.

[Thanks, Michael A,]

One day after Google goes touchscreen, along comes what looks to be an official press shot of Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic -- aka, the Tube. No new details here, though Nokia appears to have cleaned up the industrial design around the buttons of some of those earlier prototypes we've seen. October 2nd looks like the date that we'll finally get our fill of the first S60 Touch handset. Though given the number of leaks and rabid competition Nokia faces in the touchscreen OS space -- our appetite for this device might be quickly satiated.

[Via unwired view]

Well, hiddy ho Dell Precision M6400, nice to finally meet you all retail-like. The 17-inch (LED back-lit 1,920 x 1,200 pixels covering 100% of the RGB color gamut) Mobile Workstation capable of playing host to 16GB of memory, a Core 2 Duo Quad Core Extreme processor, and up to 1TB of data (2x 500GB disks in RAID 0 or RAID 1 configs) is now up on Dell's website. Other specs include up to 1GB of NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M Graphics, Bluetooth 2.1, Ultra-wideband, WWAN, GPS, 802.11a/g/n WiFi, stereo speakers and dual-array mic, 8-in-1 card reader, ExpressCard 54 and PCMCIA slots, Firewire, 4x USB 2.0, DisplayPort, eSATA, and more. All that in a 15.4 x 11.0 x 1.35-inch chassis weighing 8.5-pounds with a biggie 9-cell battery. The only thing missing is Blu-ray and that shuttle controller spotted in the teaser video. Starts at $2,599 with an October 22nd ship date.

Update: Ah, we get it: the track pad "works like a jog shuttle" -- it's not a physically distinct device. See it pictured after the break.

[Thanks, M.Luczak]

In a brief press release, LG has announced total sales of one million Prada handsets worldwide. Not bad for a March 2007 launch. The bigger news though is that LG and Prada will launch a new handset in Europe in Q4 of 2008. Prada II, we're ready.