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Philip's SFFO 3cm 4Gig Optical Discs
JL writes "New Scientist reports that Philips has a demonstration in Japan recently of a 3cm rewritable optical disc that can store four gigabytes. The drive is small too!"
Interesting that they note that 4 gigs can store 5 2 hour movies on the thing :)
WHY does everything have to relate to the cellphone?
Well, most of the world has pretty good coverage. The US is the exception largely due to its vast size, but this means that unusually for a piece of technology, the US market is considered secondary. Hence, so is increasing coverage.
The rest of the world is running out of things that cellphone companies can use to convince us to buy a new phone. It's stupid, but it serves as a quick easy application for marketing types.
Watching a movie on a 2.5" screen, no matter what the resolution, is simply silly
It would be pretty cool if they could build a decent screen into a pair of glasses though. Then the portability of something this size would be a definite benifit.
First thought when I saw this was "oh yay, another format to buy, with mediocre advantages, namely size". Mini-DVD, meet Mini-disc! Then the thought occured to me, you could theoretically increase your maximum transfer rate off this media by quite a bit over traditional-sized DVD/CD-ROMs, since the diameter is smaller and thus angular inertia is much lower. The disc will have a higher maximum speed and won't explode around 28,000 RPM. Don't feel like hacking out the math, but I'd imagine it'd be signficant.