A Hard Drive for Your Cell Phone?

[David McNamee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://cellphones.about.com/b/a/050516.htm' target='_blank'>http://cellphones.about.com/b/a/050516.htm</a><br /><br /></div>This one is definitely a few years away, but it is being reported that Toshiba has developed a hard drive, about the size of a nickel, that can store up to 3GB of data. All this extra space can be used to store photos from our camera phones, music, photos, games, etc. Toshiba could begin manufacturing phones that contained these tiny drives as early as 2005. <br /><br />While more is always better when it comes to storage, I think I would rather have a battery that could actually let me enjoy 3 gigabytes of music and photos. :|

[Terry]

Can anyone say DataPlay?

Why do OEMs insist on press releases for stuff they haven't made??

[pdaisdead]

It will probably start with PDA's (can't believe it hasn't happened yet). I predict Sony will be the first. With the iPod, Apples a logical choice, but a fullblown Apple PDA has been rumored forever. Jobs rightly knows however that the PDA is a platform gradually being killed off by the cell phone (in fact I'll bet you'd see an Apple cell phone before you'd see a PDA). But I digress....

It will happen in phones most definately though. Which begs the question, what is the future of flash memory? Once this world is completely wireless (ultra high speed wireless at that) and you've got tiny 40GB hard drives in everything, the SD card (or whatever standard they've trotted at out by that time) will go the way of the floppy disk.

Again, it's inevitable. Batteries get better and better, while hard drives consume less and less power.

[Mike Temporale]

Batteries get better and better

:? Huh? Batteries really haven't changed much in the last while. Maybe they have sqeezed a little longer life out of them. But we have yet to see leaps and bounds in battery technology like we have in PDA's and Mobile Phones.

I remember all to well how quickly my IBM Microdrive would drain the battery of my ipaq. And this was the second version that had reduced power consumption.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. However, if you've run the battery down by screwing around with the hard disk, it will be hard to answer the phone when it rings.

[pdaisdead]

Batteries get better and better

:? Huh? Batteries really haven't changed much in the last while. Maybe they have sqeezed a little longer life out of them. But we have yet to see leaps and bounds in battery technology like we have in PDA's and Mobile Phones.

I remember all to well how quickly my IBM Microdrive would drain the battery of my ipaq. And this was the second version that had reduced power consumption.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. However, if you've run the battery down by screwing around with the hard disk, it will be hard to answer the phone when it rings.

I beg to differ. Batteries do last longer now than they did 3 years ago. It's one way that phone sizes are able to keep shrinking and have little to no less in battery capacity.

Think of where we'll be in 2 to 3 years. Like any other technology, batteries will continue to improve. Or maybe batteries won't be used at all? Fuel cells or something else may take their place?

[Mike Temporale]

I beg to differ. Batteries do last longer now than they did 3 years ago. It's one way that phone sizes are able to keep shrinking and have little to no less in battery capacity.

Think of where we'll be in 2 to 3 years. Like any other technology, batteries will continue to improve. Or maybe batteries won't be used at all? Fuel cells or something else may take their place?

Batteries haven't changed much. It's the electronics around them that have. Better power management, and more integration means less power consumption. The same Lithium Ion battery technology from 5 years ago are still being used today.

In 2-3 years, I think we'll still be using Lithium Ion's.... I hope I'm wrong. There is a lot of talk about other technologies, but so far it's all talk.