I listened to the call/Q&A and wrote down some notes on what I heard from Eli's spin. Please note that these are just my impressions and may be biased since I am long SNDK. Your mileage may vary...
These are in no particular order:
- re: compatibility - type I cards fit in type II slots, but type II cards won't fit into type I slots
- he feels this "kills" SmartMedia and Clik since IBM has endorsed the Compact Flash standard
- they are developing type II slot cards as well. Wouldn't comment on specifics.....
-he feels that the Microdrive (either the 180 or 360 M version)would be most at home on "professional" model cameras. I believe he mentioned $2500 - $20000 price range for these cameras, and he said he didn't think this would impact the target market for the 4-48M Complact Flash cards/cameras
- as to the $1/Meg price point, he said that IBM's window of opportunity would be small since they are not scheduled to ship them till the 2H 99, and that CF ( at that time ) would be $1-$1.50 per megabyte.
- also re: $1/Meg. he said that users of spinning media are used to paying 3-4 cents per megabyte, so that $200-$400 dollars for the Microdrive may be difficult to swallow.
- IBM has requested that the standard be revised to increase the peak (insert something electrical here) from 100 milliamps to 500 milliamps. He commented that it was probably to speed up the drive spin-up time. He also said that kind of power consumption wouldn't be a barrier to dig. cameras, but would be a barrier to PDA/PDA-like devices. Also, he said that IBM did not say they were going to use that much power, just that they asked for a revision of the standard.
- they (SNDK) worry much more "two orders of magnitude" about Hitachi, Toshiba, and Samsung, than they are about the MicroDrive announcement.
- double density technology flash will ship in 2H99
- Gigabyte CF in 5 years
- Microdrive write time has faster write times. Said that this is not the choke point however, that it was the camera's compression algorithms that took the most time.
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