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http://www.corniceco.com/technology/crashguard.htm l

Cornice?!? I've never heard of them. It seems they did not exist before 2000, but now, just a few years later, they sound like a serious player. Too bad their privately held...might make a decent investment.

I think that something with one of these (Intel PXA27x), 64MB RAM, one of these (Cornice Storage Element, 2.0GB in the highest-end model, 1.5 in a mid-range model, 1.0 in a low-end model), a digital camera, and a WiFi card would sell QUITE nicely, especially with a nice 320x480 color display (maybe OLED will be cheap enough by the time Apple would get around to engineering one) - it wouldn't be a resolution increase, though - the MP2x00 used a 320x480 16 gray display.

It would be highly interesting how the courts will sort our all the IP obtained through aquisition of employees, technology, etc.
Colorado used to be a hot bed of storage technology but somewhere along the lines the 90s saw a consolidation and only the big guys seem to have a chance to play in the field. Surprisingly many of these companies got much of their talent from IBM Boulder refugees or high tech families in the area typically often related to IBM.

Here is an article from the Boulder paper showing the high tech companies that often get over looked in the area; look at #1,2,4,7, and 12.

It's amazing that in a world where employees in Japan have the balls to sue former employees for shafting them over huge profits -- that American companies actually think that they can totally own an Idea and not share the wealth with the inventor beyond a simple paycheck.

Corporations enjoy an overly indulgent privilage of being treated as a person by the law -- companies can NOT come up with an idea of their own -- humans do.

It will all be tracked down to an employee that came over and used what he/she knew from a former postion or way of doing things. How sad is that for the advancement of science and technology.

Thank goodness dupont didn't patent the use of beakers and tubes in science experiments.

the issue is damage to the unit. No hard drive that I am aware of was meant to be bounced up and down for an hour or more.

Then you have not been reading up on these hard drives. From one of the suppliers of tiny hard drives, Cornice.

You can read on their spec sheet:

• Designed and tested to withstand a typical vibration 'jogging' profile
• Durability that withstands a one-meter drop onto bare concrete

The skip protection IS related to that as well. When you have 32 megabytes of buffer space, you only need to spin the drive up every 25 minutes or so to read the data. Then you spin down again. The specs above relate to when the drive is spinning.

--jeff++

It gots one of these. Could it fit on a CF card? Mebbe. But it's not a CF card in the machine.

No pony, either. Damn.

it appears as if IMB and its microdrive have some competition. And if this thing is as rugged as it claims to be, the future looks good, real good.

Its on their site, In the brochure about the 2.0 Gb disk model, on page 2, near the bottom in the section that's labeled "ready to design into your device." http://www.corniceco.com/download/CorniceMarketing Brochure_2.0.pdf

A C|Net article: "The 1.5-inch GB drive, which has been in volume manufacturing since mid-April, sells for $65 in quantities of 10,000."

Cornice.

Currently, their device is only available in one Rio player, and that Rio costs $200. However, you just asked for the storage. I don't necessarily believe the rumors. However, I win your stupid challenge.

I see all these comments saying you can't make it cheap enough via RAM or Flash and that there aren't HD's small enough. What about this from Cornice. Also mentioned here.

Linq.. Just for the record, I think the $99 might be a bit optimistic, being a rumor and all.

Why wait for Apple? Creative, Rio, and RCA are already using 1" 1.5GB Cornice drives in some tiny mp3 players that make the iPod seem oversized. Cornice says they will have a 5GB model around the middle of 2004...

Actually, I think that a large screen (12-15 inch) PDA or Pocket PC would meet most needs that people have for tablet PC's. The ability to take notes and wireless access being the most important in my opinion.
The PDA's edge would be the ease of use and the instant on and off. Just add a keyboard and use the Corice Hard Drive or a MicroDrive for storage needs.
A device like this (reguardless of who makes it) would make a good laptop replacement of business people on the go, students or anybody else that need more than a PDA but less than a laptop.

Apple wasn't the first to make hard drive MP3 players. The first one I recall seeing on the market was the Creative Lab's Nomad Jukebox (haven't got an exact date on the very first one), in 2000. It had to be out at least a year before iPod. Apple and everyone else pretty much took that idea and ran with it. iPod is a good device especially when paired with iTunes but, it's not without its limitations, as pointed out in this CNet article , five reasons not to buy an iPod , already posted on /. Me, I've got a Rio Nitrus, which uses the Cornice Storage Element and it's a nice fit between the bulkier hard drive players (like the iPod) and the solid state players that have less storage. If Apple really wants to take the lead they should help Cornice to up their drive capacity (like to 20 Gb) and sell it in a smaller iPod that has a replaceable battery.

Maybe you mean that those other players are going to compete with the iPod? Yeah, that's probably what you mean. Hmmm.

iPods are... $299 for 10GB, $399 for 20GB, $499 for 40GB.

(Who the #$%^&#$& has 40 frickin' gigs of MUSIC? I mean, I don't think there are radio stations with playlists that big!)

Rio's Karma 20 is... $399 for 20GB. Comes with a dock and stuff (though it looks like the dock will use up an electrical outlet, since it's not Firewire). Doesn't look like it's anything but a music player, didn't see mention of the extra apps an iPod has. But, well, same capacity, same price, okay, I guess that's competing.

iRiver's HP-100 is... $399 for 10GB. Hey, that's a great idea! "Apple's charging an arm and a leg for the iPod and it's selling like hotcakes covered with blow and naked babes... let's price ours even higher so we can sell even more! Yee-ha!" Uh... no, that's not competing. Even if they'd gotten away from the stale, er, ahem, time-honored "Sony Walkman" look.

Philips' HDD-100 is... well, I couldn't find anywhere selling them, so I'm not sure how much competing it's doing.

The RCA's someone mentioned are cheaper - $199 for 10GB and $249 for 20GB - but they appear to be discontinued and those are closeout prices.

I was talking to an analyst the other day who seemed convinced that the new tiny el-cheapo hard drive from Cornice were going to rule the roost. Well, maybe among the people who only want 1.5GB of storage and are happy that they can get it for significantly less than the cost of 1.5GB of flash RAM... but that's only a few hundred songs. Hardly the sort of thing you'd want to use as the emergency backup for a radio station.

If you check out their brochure you'll note that they say "jog profile: constant motion," in other words it should continue to work even with constant motion. It was designed with this sort of application in mind, I'm sure.

--spreer

That's an error in the article. According to Cornice's website, It's a 1.5GB drive.