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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Linda Pearson who wrote (50876)	3/21/1998 4:58:00 PM
From: Wdiamond	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58324

All: An interesting must read article on clik! Link at the bottom. March 23, 1998, TechWeb News Making a (clik!) Comeback By Doug Olenick Iomega may have been an early knockout victim in the portable removable storage battle that's raged for a year, but the company is attempting a comeback with two new products slated for release in 1998. The company was ejected unceremoniously from the digital-camera fight last year when its Nhand storage product turned out to be a market dud when matched against SanDisk's CompactFlash and Toshiba's SmartMedia flash memory cards. The maker of the famed Zip drive is now pinning its hopes on its upcoming clik! portable memory system. The company believes its flash-memory competitors cannot match clik!'s 40MB capacity and $199 price point. CompactFlash has just become available in 40MB doses, but at almost twice clik!'s expected street price. Toshiba's SmartMedia is less expensive than the CompactFlash, but the largest-capacity card holds just 16MB of data. "There is not much going on at the lower affordable end of the product scale. Everything coming out has high-end prices," said Michael McGamon, product line manager for Iomega's clik! business. Both of the products will make it difficult for clik! to gain any headway, said Alexis Gerard, president of the digital imaging research firm Future- Image, Burlingame, California. SmartMedia and CompactFlash are already established names, are smaller than clik! and do not use any battery power. "Solid-state manufacturers are dropping their prices, and while they are still priced outside the mass audience, the trend is heading downward," Gerard said. The clik! sys-tem is an offshoot of Iomega's failed Nhand device, itself basically a trimmed-down Zip drive. N*hand could hold 20MB of data, but, being a magnetic media device, it required a power-hungry, battery-driven drive inside each camera, which proved to be a major turnoff for most digital-camera makers. McGamon believes Iomega has solved this problem with clik! Instead of just being an internal memory device, clik! now comes in two flavors. A clik! disk is about half the size of a business card. The portable drive is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. A docking station connects to a PC or notebook computer, allowing the digital images to be downloaded through the serial port. Iomega is shopping clik!, so far unsuccessfully, as an OEM product for digital camera makers to use as a camera's primary memory, said McGamon. Unlike its predecessor, clik! is not a battery hog, he said, and offers a great deal of storage capacity for the mega-pixel cameras that are taking over the market. Two other aftermarket versions have also been developed and are expected to start shipping this summer. One is targeted at the digital camera user and the other is for use with handheld computers. The digital camera connects to the clik! drive, allowing the user to download the images onto the disc. The clik! recorder is then dropped into a docking station. The handheld computer version of the product is similar in all respects, but the packaging and merchandising material are geared to attract a different customer. Being able to empty a camera's on-board memory will increase the camera's utility, since only a few mega-pixel images can be stored on the 4MB flash memory cards used by today's digital cameras, according to Iomega's McGamon. Other devices have different methods of downloading images. SanDisk's CompactFlash card is bundled with a PC card adapter that can be plugged directly into a notebook or used with a PC card reader on a desktop computer. Toshiba's answer has the SmartMedia card fitting into an adapter shaped like a 3.5-inch diskette, which can be slid into a PC drive. This device was jointly developed with Fuji. Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. You can reach this article directly: techweb.com