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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DukeCrow who wrote (11994)	6/15/2000 6:15:00 PM
From: wily	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Is it possible that hi-speed wireless internet will make inroads into the flash storage market -- You take a picture and email it home? wily

To: DukeCrow who wrote (11994)	6/16/2000 6:43:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

I think you'll always need some sort of temporary storage media. It would be too taxing on the infrastructure to download and upload images all the time. Ali, I am with you 100%. Nobody is going to trust their photos to a wireless connection into cyberspace. Also, the ISP's are going to get blow away with people accessing the network and uploading large packets of data such as digital photos. Some on the Yahoo! thread have carried a "wireless conquers local storage" campaign using Bluetooth as a vehicle. Even if you start looking at the early descriptions of Bluetooth's applications you will see it is designed for "PAN's" or "personal area networks" within your home. I suppose you could have a PAN between a digital camera and a storage device you wear on your body. (Let's say it was a 10 gigabyte flash memory drive that you wear on your waist.) I would worry about the long term effect of the energy from radio frequencies so close to your face. Also, it requires the consumer to carry two devices, not just one. Lastly, the storage device would likely still use flash in some form. There is a good summary of the handheld market in this month's Red Herring which I have read in its entirety. I plan to post selected passages here over the weekend. And don't forget, if cards drop in price enough, you'll have people giving, trading, borrowing cards from friends to exchange photographs, music, and videos (eventually). Again, I think we are on the same wavelength here. SanDisk is planting a seed in the mind of the consumer. That is, CompactFlash will be affordable enough to allow multiple attachment rates. The multipack idea is a great one. It reminds me of the gig-o-color Zip packages where you talk yourself into buying 10 x 100MB Zip discs rather than a 3 pack. The other analogy I wish to make is the Swatch Watch parallel. If you make CompactFlash sexy enough (and there are MANY ways to do this) you can imagine people buying multiple cards for various applications, various moods and styles,... Storage is very personal and people will respond to ways of personalizing flash cards. It comes down to marketing (creating a market where one currently does not exist) and cost (the notion of "market elasticity" which Eli has been promoting). Aus

To: DukeCrow who wrote (11994)	6/16/2000 6:59:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 60323

Wired Magazine has yet another piece... ...on Transmeta. I think the story of how the company worked in total seclusion for 5 years is fascinating and suspenseful. Intel has been bad mouthing Transmeta, but the fact is there are no demo chips available except to OEM's (reportedly a deal with AOL to create a net tablet PC is in the works) and Transmeta engineers. The notion of a net-enabled handheld PC which is extremely stingy with available power is attractive. I still believe that flash memory will play an important role in whatever Transmeta brings to market. The problem being that the CPU and the data storage solutions are only a piece of the puzzle. The LCD screen is yet another problem to solve. Perhaps organic LCD's or cyberdisplays will catch on and offer new choices for designers. Transmeta also hired Linus Torvald to write software for the system's platform. I understand Crusoe and its variants will operate on a mobile Unix/Linux platform. Does anyone know if SanDisk's products are compatible with Unix? It would appear from some recent articles I have seen that incorporating a whole Pocket PC OS (or the entire EPOC or Palm OS for that matter) is not necessary for most net-enabled handhelds. Some scaled-down version with browser function is all that is really needed. Most of the GSM-based cellphones with web access use a WAP protocol that is uploaded from a SIM card. That way it is easy to upgrade older phones with the equivalent of a smart card insertion rather than a hardware exchange which is labor intensive and adds complexity for the design engineers. Do most SIM cards require some form of flash as well? Ausdauer