Panasonic has announced their development of the world's thinnest internal Blu-ray drive. At just 9.5 mm tall, it's thin enough for laptops but still packs a performance punch. We're talking 2X recording for both BD-R and BD-RE (rewritable) discs, along with BD-R DL support (but we're guessing that the dual layer writing is just 1X...have fun burning those 50GB discs). The drive also supports DVDs with 8x burning on all types of discs. It's priceless for now with Panasonic only shipping units to manufacturers at the moment, but we'll get more details soon when it's on display at CES. [fareastgizmos]

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