Samsung Cell Phones to Get Tiny Hard Drive
 

Samsung Cell Phones to Get Tiny Hard Drive

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has announced the world's first mobile phone to sport a tiny hard drive. With the built-in 1-inch, 1.5-gigabyte hard disk, the SPH-V5400 could store about 15 times more data than conventional handsets -- everything from digital music files and photos to video, Samsung said.

The phone is equipped with a mega-pixel camera, camcorder, MP3 player, a high-resolution 2.2-inch display, a microphone and dual speakers. It will be available in South Korea later this month...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/tech...rd-Drives.html

I think there are already phones with one or more megapixel cameras... So that's not new... However the idea of a HD seems like a good one...

Impressive! More storage then a PDA!

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Indeed, yet will that alone make it worthwhile in a seemingly very crowded field? :)

...Would it push the iPod out of your pocket?

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/mob...9165677,00.htm

Well, more than a PDA without a 1Gb SD card.

The problem with having a moving HD in a phone is that one drop will kill the drive...

I personally prefer flash memory for devices like this...

Perhaps these should come with a clear warning notifying users that they should be extremely careful not to drop their cell phones. :)

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Hitachi and Intel join forces on mobile phone drives

...Toshiba will also be sampling a 0.85in drive that has a capacity of up to 4Gbytes. Toshiba has yet to finalise the capacity, but the drive will be available before 31 December this year, according to Makoto Yasuda, a company spokesman.

Toshiba said in January that it expected to put the drive into mobile phones...

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N4F163849

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index....20;fp;2;fpid;1

Quite possibly, yes. I think it's a much better convergence than PDA/phone which have yet to solve the issue of screen size and form factor (PDA's want a bigger screen).

Ooops I droped my phone and now I have nothing...
 

Although the idea sounds great for storage of data and perhaps music if the phone has MP3 playback mode. However HDD's are so sensitive as we all know from using our laptops on bumpy airflights.

IBM recently developed a system in their new Thinkpad series that automatically locks the HDD in the event of any jarring movements of the device. But it is not failsafe 100% of the time. So what if you were walking with the phone and dropped it on the ground? Solidstate memory cards, no problem....... HDD memory, big problem.

Also what is the addition of a HDD going to do for battery life? I would rather have longer talktime than a HDD for nonsense items. What are you going to do with it? Download pictures from the Internet and view them on your little 2x2 screen?

I think that I will pass on the HDD idea, cellphones with cheapo cameras and Bluetooth technology until the resolution get above 3 Megapixel, companies around the world really use Bluetooth in the way it was envisioned and the HDD are proven to be drop rated from at least 10 feet high onto a concrete surface.

What's to keep a cell-phone company from using the same technology as IBM to park the disk heads if an accelerometer detects "free-fall"?

...and - about a month ago I was hiking in my general neighborhood with my cell phone in my backpack. I was about 40 minutes from home when Hurricane Charlie's left-over rain decided I was a really nice target. I was soaked, of course, along with everything in my backpack. (It was a short hike, never really far from civilization, so I didn't carry the foul-weather gear I would have taken otherwise.) It stopped working, but after drying out for 5-6 days it was as good as new. I just had to move my account to a friend's old phone for the duration.

If there had been a hard disk in there, I'm pretty sure it would have been bye-bye cell phone.

I, personally, do not want a cell phone that combines the functions of a camera, an MP3 player, a PDA, a Web browser, a Game-Boy, a DVD player and a coffee maker. I want one that lets me talk as easily and reliably as possible, with maximum range and battery life. In other words, make it the best cell phone you can, period.

YMMV, of course. That's why we don't all drive the same car either.

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What? A phone to make and receive calls? :D

You, and I as well, BTW, are SO very provincial it seems! ;)

-Mark

...But for small drives to make a big dent in the mobile phone market, they must overcome a number of hurdles, industry observers say. These include the ability to handle wear and tear, a smaller appetite for battery power, and a low price tag.

IDC has a conservative view of how well drives will spin their way into cell phones. About 500,000 mobile phones equipped with a built-in drive will ship in 2005, and the number will rise to 5.2 million in 2008, according to IDC.

Reinsel said manufacturers are likely to have to sell drives for roughly $30 each in order for phones using them to be cheap enough for mass adoption. But he said that's a difficult price point for drive makers.

"It's going to be very hard to make money at $30 a drive," he said...

http://news.com.com/Samsung+working+...l?tag=nefd.top

Samsung unveils mobile phone with 3GB storage
 

Samsung unveils mobile phone with 3GB storage

...The SPH-V7900 allows users to store two or three full-length movies (at 1.1-5GB each) or more than 700 music files (at 4MB each).

...This model comes with harmonic colour, a feature which converts all musical elements such as scale, octave, tone and volume into visual images in colours and patterns.

It also has a 2 mega-pixel camera with 2x optical zoom, MP3 player, and document viewer function...

http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/defa...rticleID=10811

I don't understand a 3gb HDD when flash seems so much better. As with everything else, I'm all for as few moving parts as necessary.

This reminds me of the time IBM released the microstar series- starting at 340megs and going up to 1 gig in the size of a CF card and what a huge drain they were to the camera in terms of battery life. Considering that flash memory in SD size has hit 2 gigs (and down to $130), and CF up to 4 gigs, what's the point of using portable hard drives.

If anything, look at the direction from the iPod Mini to iPod Nano, a change from hdd to solid state.

//realizes this thread was posted before the advent of 2 gig SD, and possibly at a time when 1 gig SD was very expensive.