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1" Hard Drives in Cellphones on the Rise
Tomo Hiratsuka writes "The imminent 10Gb 1-inch hard drives we've been hearing about have been well covered but the maker, Cornice, reckons its product could end up in over 70 million cellphones by 2009. Kevin Magenis, one of the company founders, isn't shy about pointing out that this is 30 million units more than predicted DAP sales."
I had to think about this for a moment. "DAP" means "Digital Audio Player". (e.g. iPod, etc.)
I believe this is the first time this term has appeared in a SlashDot article. (Perhaps a SlashDot Glossary would be a good idea?)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
This article has a little more info, including a projected price of $18.50/GB.
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
The drives shows up as USB storage devices (at least they do in the newer Nokia models). You can just access them that way and copy the music or whatever over. That's what I do.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I read an article about Cornice a while back (upon further googling, here it is). They were approached by Apple to be the exclusive supplier of HDs for the iPod Mini. They ended up turning Apple down in order to focus on the phone hard drive market. Time will tell how smart of a decision that was, but if there's one thing you can say about their CEO it's that he's got some brass ones. I think it was a pretty stupid move, but then Apple would be done with this tech by now (only flash in the Nano, bigger HDs in the 5G iPod) so maybe they will sell a lot of phones with hard drives and become rich.
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
"Since all phones are locked down DRM-wise why do I need a hard drive in them?"
"Not that anybody is going to especially when you look at providers like Verizon who go out of their way to cripple their customers phones instead."
Have consider that:
- most cell phone users don't live in US and thus couldn't care less about Verizon
- in most countries you can buy a cell phone that isn't tied to a certain operator
- in some countries it is illegal to sell these locked and crippled phones altogether
I was in the Verizon store yesterday (for an hour and fifty minutes, argh, but that's another story) and saw several reasonably nice, small phones without cameras. Nothing as small as a razr, but a few things smaller than, say, my Motorola E815.
By 2008, the projected release date of the 1" hard drive, I'm sure miniSD's will be up to at least 4GB if not 8GB, without the power drain of spinning platters, without the seek and latency, and in a much smaller form factor.
We can see from IBM's CompactFlash hard drives how limited the market is -- basically photographers who can't afford the time to change their "film". But the trend is to smaller and more personal devices, and the market for tiny hard drives will be even smaller in 2008.
Your issue is exactly why enterprise and government wireless providers offer versions of modern phones without cameras, such as the no-camera Treo 650NC offered by Sprint.
I hope that post was a troll. I don't know what's worse... the fact that none of what you said makes sense or the fact that apparently people think it's correct.
For the mods who rated that post "informative" and "interesting":
Microwaves have wavelengths measurable in centimeters. This makes them very bad for data storage. The whole reason the industry is trying to move to Blu-ray and similar technologies is because blue colored light has a much SHORTER wavelength than the traditional red colored lasers used in established data storage devices. The "size" of the bit being stored (and therefore the number of bits you can store in a given area) is directly proportional to this wavelength.
The wavelength of the microwave radiation emitted by the phone is roughly 35 centimeters. The wavelength of light used in CD drives is roughly 0.000078 centimeters. That's nearly 13000 times larger! So you'd think you could store 1/13000th the data in the same spot using microwaves than you could fit using regular CD laser tech.
All this ignores some other very serious technical issues, of course... like how the unfocused microwave energy emitted by the antenna (or anywhere else in the phone) is directed and focused towards the HD platter, and how the microwave energy is able to interact with the platter to read and toggle magnetic bits considering microwaves bounce right off metal surfaces.
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The size of the R/W heads is NOT a limiting factor.It is easy enough to use MEMS technology to make them only a few billions of a meter wide, so they can be built plenty small enough. The real limiting factor is how closely you can back the magnetic regions that encode the data before they interfere with each other and lose the ability to retain their state.
I need another cup of coffee...
=Smidge=
You obviously haven't ever worked for the government.
Its not just government either - some companies don't let their users use thumb drives because of IP theft issues.
While I work for part of the government that currently doesn't care about my cell phone, I've been applying to various parts that do care (Computer shtuff) - my current phone has a camera on it and if I get one job or another, I'll have to get a second phone (no camera) and change my card out daily. Heck, my father-in-law can't carry around a phone with a camera due to gov contracts...
BTW - its soooo much easier here in Europe than it is in the US when it comes to cell phones. I tried to get a cell phone for my sister for Xmas and found that I would have to enter into a contract with any number of companies that serviced the area she lives in. Even the "prepaid" phones like Virgin had this issue. Here in the EU, I would have been able to buy a prepaid phone and send along a damn prepaid card with it. After that ran out, she would have been able to choose from any number of prepaid cards to use.
My Nokia 6255i has a space (under the battery, *dipshits*) for an MMC card & SIM card. I can load a 1Gig MMC full of mp3's, pull it from my PC reader, slip it in the phone, and play them until the battery dies. No need for tweaking them - the phone plays them just fine. And that works for some video's too. Granted, the screen is REALLY small to be watching video on, but it adds to the geek factor when your peers realize you're watching a movie while they're playing lame-ass games in the waiting lines... MUH HAhahahahh...