David -
I just checked out the entire 26 slide presentation on the SmartMedia format, available at the Toshiba website. The url, for anyone interested, is toshiba.com
The presentation does indeed show a floppy disk adaptor, into which the SmartMedia device is inserted. This assembly is then inserted into a PC, and ostensibly read by the floppy drive of the PC. No details on how this works, or how a PC BIOS deals with floppy disks larger than 1.44 MB, ship dates, or anything. The indication is that this is part of the "Evolution of SSFDC technology." (That's Solid State Floppy Disk Card.)
I also didn't see anything on the site to indicate that the 2 MB card would have any special capabilities with regard to capacity. Thus, a 2MB card would hold more like 6 or 7 photographs of fairly high resolution. But I suppose some sort of aggressive compression could be built into the camera's storage algorithms.
In the meantime, as others have been pointed out, every type of flash storage beats n.hand right now, since n.hand is still just a gleam in Kim Edwards' eye. But at around 25 bucks a megabyte, this item would have trouble competing with n.hand if it ever got out the door. All of this is really irrelevant right now anyway.
- Allen |
