Flash ushers in extreme portability
SOLID STATE MEMORY Format is starting to break price and capacity barriers It’s compact, easy on batteries, stands up to the elements
The iPod Nano may be small, but it’s shaking things up big time.
Apple Computer’s latest portable MP3 player now also plays videos, and the company has switched from the hard drives used in earlier models to flash memory — solid state memory in a chip.
Industry watchers say other manufacturers won’t be far behind with larger- capacity MP3 players, as flash memory starts to fall in price and grow in capacity.
Flash memory is all around us under many different names.
It has started to break price and capacity barriers and, having already replaced floppy disks, is well on its way to challenging CDs, DVDs, digital tapes, hard drives and other storage devices as the memory of choice. Murtz Jaffer, 25, a University of Toronto student and a webmaster bought a USB flash drive last year and says he’s hooked. Costs for the drives vary from $ 15 to $20 for 128 megabytes to $340 to $675 for four gigabytes.
“ To run my website, I’d stay and work from school but I had to have my files with me,” Jaffer says.
“ I was using floppy disks, but they don’t hold much information so I had about six of them and was always shuffling.
“ Then I got a USB key. It’s great because I can get everything on it — it’s like night and day.” Most commonly, you’ll find solid memory — flash memory — in still cameras, video cameras that shoot stills and MP3 players. But they’re also found on key fobs as portable personal memory storage devices, in printers and in cellphones to store ring tones, images, maps and documents. Some industrial tools save settings to a memory chip, while higher- end TVs have memory card slots to play a slideshow of pictures from digital cameras.
They’re called SD ( Secure Digital) memory cards, MultiMedia Memory Cards ( MMC), Compact Flash Cards ( CF) or Memory Sticks (a proprietary Sony product), while those key fob or around- the- neck units are known as pen drives, thumb drives or USB drives, and they all fit different slots. Format differences aside, their advantage is that with no moving parts, they use about 30 times less battery power, are smaller and withstand heat and cold, sunlight and humidity much better, according to a report last month by New Yorkbased analysts Needham & Co.
“ One guy wrote to say he’d put his SD memory card through the laundry with his clothes and all his honeymoon pictures were on it,” says Paul Reinhardt, executive director of the SD Card Association, which represents more than 800 companies around the world. “Turns out, all the pictures were fine.” On the downside, says Needham’s report, the more fragile hard drives are cheaper on a gigabytecomparison, transfer information faster and come in huge capacities, of 250 gigabytes and greater, while the current limit for memory chips is four gigabytes. Manufacturers of memory chips, such as Samsung, claim the death knell of hard drives is already sounding as the price gap narrows and memory size grows, with projections of 32 GB capacities in the near future. Needham’s analysts say that’s a little premature.
However, it does project USB and SD Memory sales to triple and quadruple worldwide through 2008.
It’s easy to see why. As image resolution in digital camera increases — 3.0 to 5.0 megapixel models are standard these days — so, too, does the capacity of memory cards.
Today, 1 GB cards sell for about $100 or less, and that’s more than enough capacity for a two weeks of vacation pictures, even at high resolution. The music and movie industries are also eyeing the cards as an alternative to CDs and DVDs because they’re smaller, lighter and easier to package and ship. Needham analysts suggest that as MP3 players acquire bigger and more energy- efficient memories, the notion of entertainmentwill take off.
Podcasting, or downloading an audio program to an iPod- type device, is growing in popularity. Downloading movies or TV shows for viewing on mobile device is the wave of the future. Knowing which card works with which device has been a hurdle to wider acceptance. Rather than wait for a VHS vs. Beta- style war to play out, the solution among device manufacturers has been to make their devices accommodate them all, Reinhardt says.
“ It is a bit of a confusing situation for consumers,” he says.
“ As the price point falls, it’s easier for manufacturers to have a slot that takes multipleformat memory cards so it makes less difference which one you have.” Needham also sees other opportunities, such as recording TV shows to memory cards instead of the traditional hard drive, DVD recorders or personal video recorders. The Needham report forecasts that digital video cameras could soon replace digital tape cassettes with the smaller cards, as prices fall low enough for “ consumers to adopt a use- once philosophy.”