Sorry if these links have been posted before. Sandisk longs ought to take notice:
siemens.com
samsungelectronics.com
There's two things that startled me about these MP3 phones, each of which will be sold with 32 MB flash cards pre-installed. First, they're both set to come out later this year. Second, they both weigh less than 100g (the average phone today weighs around 110-130g). I know that Samsung competes with Sandisk, so I doubt that they're using Sandisk's chips (although they still undoubtedly will pay royalties); but Siemens is a possibility.
So far, I've held off on investing in Sandisk due to my prior belief that it'd still be a while before removable flash cards would become possible to use in conjunction with small, light, convenient, user-friendly handsets; but the Siemens and Samsung phones are making me think twice about that. What particularly interests me here is the potential for flash to be used to store digital camera pictures and short movie clips as well. This, in turn, would lead to handset manufacturers seeking the highest-capacity removable flash cards to pre-install on their phones (within a reasonable price range, of course), and we all know who leads here.
I know there's been some talk about automatically uploading pictures taken from digital cameras directly to the internet, but for high-quality pictures, this might not be the most economical solution given the amount of bandwidth that could quickly be taken up on 3G networks that are inevitably going to be capacity-constrained as it is. For the next few years, flash cards seem to be the best solution; and even after that, users might still prefer the flexibility and ease of use that a removable card offers. After all, even though the internet's reduced the pressing need for floppy disks, it hasn't made them obsolete.
Meanwhile, one of the best-kept secrets regarding the rise of file swapping services such as Napster is that many of them, such as Scour Media Exchange and iMesh, are now also being used significantly to share different types of video files. With always-on broadband connections rapidly proliferating, the potential future popularity of video downloads, and of handsets that provide the ability to view the contents of such downloads, shouldn't be forgotten about. If it's easy enough to install MP3 software on handsets, installing the Real Player, WMP, and AVI playback software shouldn't be too difficult either. The only potential holdups here could be the lack of quality color displays and embedded video cards on such devices. However, given the 3G prototypes that I've seen (see gsmworld.com, this hurdle also will most likely be crossed without much difficulty.
Eric |
