PluggedIn: Memory Cards Ready for the Big Screen
2 hours, 25 minutes ago Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Daniel Sorid
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Portable memory cards that store digital photographs and music have become affordable enough to store video, sending gadget makers on a quest to put movie screens onto all sorts of portable devices.
Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news) will release at the end of the year a cell phone that can record and store video clips. In September, Sony Corp (news - web sites). (6758.T) will sell a hand-held computer with the ability to record and play high-quality video.
Flash memory, sold as matchbox-size cards under brand names such as Memory Stick and Compact Flash, can be found in stores for about $60 for 256 megabytes of space, enough for several music albums or a small video file.
One gigabyte and larger memory cards -- enough to comfortably hold a full-length movie -- sell for about $225 in one version, and prices are dropping fast.
Of course, using a memory chip is not the only way to hold a movie in your hand; DVD lasers and hard drives have been crammed into portable devices that can play movies as well as any memory-based device. What makes flash memory so desirable is that it doesn't skip like a CD and requires no moving parts to read it, saving on power consumption.
Flash memory is also small enough to include in mobile phones. By 2007, the primary destination of flash memory cards will be mobile phones, according to technology research firm Gartner.
Motorola, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker, has embraced flash memory as a way to build phones that store large road maps for global positioning functions and more Web pages for use on the high-speed mobile Internet. Video and music will also be stored on phones with flash memory cards.
"These are small devices that are by necessity constrained by space and power, and so memory is always a challenge," said Rob Shaddock, general manager for Motorola's GSM/TDMA product group. "As memory becomes more abundant, as the cost per bit starts to fall, then you see increasingly richer experiences on the devices."
STRIVING FOR VIDEO
Flash memory varieties in recent years were most popular at the 64-megabyte size -- enough for music but inadequate for video. With multi-gigabyte cards showing up on store shelves, video on flash memory has finally become desirable.
Sony's newest Clie, its palmtop computer that runs on the Palm operating system, is already creating a stir -- not least for its $699 price tag. The UX-50 model, in addition to connecting to the Internet not with wires, but with a built-in Wi-Fi chip, can record movies, play them back, and can store data on Memory Sticks.
"The devices are finally starting to get up to the times," Alex Slawsby, an analyst for IDC, said.
Spending on flash memory cards in 2003 is forecast to be $2.6 billion this year, growing to $4.5 billion in 2007, according to new data from Gartner. Nevertheless, flash memory cards face fierce competition from other data storage, including hard drives, which remain the cheapest and most popular way to hold large amounts of data.
Perhaps the best known hard drive portable device is the iPod, Apple Computer Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) music player. Apple has won the praise of electronics critics for sticking a massive, but tiny, hard drive in a device that can be easily held in one hand.
Archos Inc., an electronics maker in Irvine, California, sells a slightly larger variant on the iPod, but it can play video as well.
(The PluggedIn column appears weekly. Comments or questions on this one can be e-mailed to daniel.sorid(at)reuters.com.)
"Whatever time I've got left now belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs"
AI
