e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[cksla]

Setting Precedent for the Next Decade: Big Battles of 2004

For starters, technology vendors apparently see consumers as easy pickings and are bringing out the big guns at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year. Hold on to your wallets, because the number of new products and product categories expected to be announced this week is unprecedented.

Those compelling products include portable media centers (like iPods but with video), media players for cars and the home that are hard disk-based, media servers, 40" LCD flat panels (current products are 30" max), higher-resolution camera phones, and low-cost digital cameras with high resolution and burst mode that can take pictures very quickly.

...

Cornice Drives vs. Flash vs. Hard Drives

This battle is going to be ugly. Traditional magnetic hard drives have the advantage on capacity and price per megabyte of storage, but they are relatively fragile and use a substantial amount of power. Flash drives are the most robust and power efficient, but they also are the most costly by a significant margin, per megabyte, and Cornice drives fall someplace in the middle. Players based on Cornice drives, for those who are not familiar with them, come in several form factors but are typically about a cubic inch in size and can contain several GB of data.
For MP3 players, this means that in a 256-MB flash player, you get about 64 songs. In a 2-GB Cornice player, you get 1,000 songs, and in a 40-GB iPod you get a call from the RIAA asking for the deed to your house. Practically speaking, when it comes to music, anything more then 1 GB on a portable player becomes very difficult to manage. Given that all of these players now provide high-speed PC synchronization, why would you want to manage them on a player?

However, in 2004, we add video -- and a movie can occupy upward of 4 GB of disk space. So, for MP3 players, we do have a fight. But for the new class of Portable Media Centers, traditional hard drives are clearly here to stay.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32514.html