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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Z Analyzer who wrote (7803)	1/14/2000 2:30:00 PM
From: Mark Oliver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

The quality of MP3 is a big issue, but of course so is the space needed to keep it. There are several formats for storage, but MP3 seems to have first mover advantage. I guess when you talk quality; you also have to talk about other factors like if you are mobile, how good is listening to music with headphones? Or, do you ever get best quality in a car? I think we see a lesser level of base from MP3, but I don't know why, nor have I done a study to know enough to really comment. A lot of people would say keeping 80 hours of music is pretty ridiculous? I think it all comes back to how easy it is to stream from the net and how much you have to pay to keep music offline, vs. buying it once and transferring it from device to device. So, streaming is always a balance of sound quality versus size of the file for download speed and storage. Do we see hard drives in cars? None of the AutoPC's today shows a hard drive based system, although they do have CD and DVD. 2 of the AutoPC's I saw had removable compact flash. Getting the stuff into the car is a question. Do you download programs and media with a portable storage like flash, Clik, RWDVD or RWCD, or do you look for some wireless link? I think we'll see car computers linked to cell networks, but again the current system is too slow. That will change in 2 or 3 years and by that time people's demand will have changed as well. The other choice is a wireless connection like Bluetooth, which I believe will be big, or infrared. Wired connections to a car seem less likely, but you could have a USB or 1394 connection in all the places you normally park your car. Nah. Then, finally you have the convergence of devices as cell phones throw in MP3. Win CE supports Mp3 now. Really cool also was Cleartype. I saw books on the Casio Cassiopeia and it looked good. Blend this with MP3 and video and music and you've got heaps of storage requirement. A device with a 4+ gig hard drive in that environment looks pretty good. Using a flash buffer to minimize the disk requirements to bursts makes the shock problem perhaps less complicated. So, I guess we need to know when these Win CE computers will have so many functions that they include hard drives. Regards, Mark