As a mobile professional, it can be hard to decide whether to carry around a compact cell phone or a bulkier PDA style phone. On the one hand, you don’t want to have to lug around something that’s bigger than it needs to be, but at the same time, PDA style phones typically offer better mobile email usability and functionality.

Nokia, the world leader in mobile phones, is set to launch a device that caters to both ends of that market. The Nokia E90 Communicator looks like a fairly conventional candybar-style handset at first glance, but the interesting thing about it is that you can open it like a book, revealing a mini-laptop form factor complete with a super widescreen display. The initial launch will be in Europe, but it will be available in Canada through importers like Expansys.

Key features include a 3.2 megapixel camera, QWERTY keyboard, quad-band GSM radios, Bluetooth, WiFi, Symbian OS Version 9.2, microSD expansion, Nokia Intellisync Wireless Email, Quickoffice, instant messaging, text-to-speech message reader, and an integrated multimedia player. This is one crazy phone, so it’ll probably be quite expensive, getting close to the $1k mark in Canadian dollars. On a related note, the first unit was sold at a charity auction for US$5000 in Jakarta, Indonesia earlier this month.

It’s all about being mobile. That’s why more and more professionals and business people have to rock the absolute best when it comes to their Blackberry handhelds, cell phones, and laptop computers. That said, a big weakness of laptops is that they typically come with 2.5-inch hard drives that spin at a measly 5400rpm, whereas their 3.5-inch desktop counterparts do the same dance at 7200rpm. This makes for a considerable difference in performance. What is the mobile power user to do?

Thankfully, Hitachi has just announced the imminent availability of their new Travelstar 7K200, a 2.5-inch hard drive that can spin at a desktop-worthy 7200rpm. The SATA hard drive offers a max transfer speed of 876MBps — 22% faster than the previous version — as well as a 16MB cache, a noise rating of 29dB and power consumption rated at 2.6W.

Look for the Travelstar 7K200 — great for portable hard drive enclosures as well as notebook computers — to ship in 80GB, 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, and 200GB capacities. Now we just have to figure out how much they’d cost.