JOhn, Dataplay ..has been discussed here some months ago.
Main issue, cost to put the drive inside players, cameras, etc, makes the upfront cost of such a device very high even if longer term it would be cheaper (which is debateable since the drives are write-only). Note that all their publicity concentrates on how cheap the discs are and ignores the cost of the drive.
One possibility for them would be as a stand alone datastore to enable you to dump a CF/MMC and then continue using it. There are already (expensive) devices that do this, maybe they could build a cheaper one of those? Is this a viable option though? Don't know, but if they need any more money they are in trouble, they wont be raising any through an IPO in the forseeable future!
To a very large extent, their future is probably more determined by burn rate than whether or not its a good device. They will use a lot of money advertising it, they need to get wide distribution of dataplay enabled devices and media, and they are probably not going to get digi cam design ins. Their market also shrinks every time the cost of flash media drops.
Finally, IMHO the fact that it is write only limits it a great deal. Personally, I'd rather have a microdrive than a dataplay, because I wouldnt have to shell out ?$10? every time I fill a disc up. In fact, come to think of it, what advantage would Dataplay have over Microdrive?
Tw |
