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| Envisioning a radically different future |
March 9, 2004 |
By Jim Harris
The consumer electronics (CE) industry is clearly pulling out of the economic downturn. Miniaturization is changing the CE market, the industry and the future of competition.
With the exception of TVs, which are getting bigger, CE devices are getting smaller and smaller. The most amazing example of this is the decreasing size — and increasing capacity — of micro hard drives. Imagine a hard disk the size of a quarter. These one-inch drives now have capacity up to 4.8GB, enabling makers of every type of CE device to shrink their products.
SHRINKING MP3S
The most successful CE device ever is the Sony Walkman. At one time, portable cassette players sold a million units a week. The lesson: consumers love portability. Witness the iPod, which has sold more than two million units to date.One-inch hard disks are redefining portability and will drive the MP3 market to new heights. About a dozen MP3 players have just been launched based on either a 1.5GB or 4GB micro drive — with the capacity to hold 400 and more than 1,000 songs respectively — allowing users to carry most, if not all, the music they love with them at all times in a two- to 3.6-ounce device. Apple’s iPod Mini, announced in January, has a 4GB drive, while Creative Labs’ two new MuVo2 units come in both 1.5 and 4GB capacity levels. Rio’s two-ounce Nitrus uses the 1.5GB drive. These MP3 players allow consumers to carry substantially more songs than MP3 players that use flash cards.
NEW COMPETITORS
While hard disk manufacturing has historically been dominated by companies like Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor and Connors, only three manufacturers produce one-inch drives: Hitachi, which introduced the format, Cornice and GS Magicstor. Colorado-based Cornice is an upstart selling the 1.5GB drives. GS Magicstor, a Chinese start-up, has produced the largest-capacity micro drive to date at 4.8GB, and plans to launch a 6GB drive in the fall with 10GB coming by mid-2005. And at CES, both GS Magicstor and Toshiba announced the development of sub-one-inch drives, which will accelerate the miniaturization of CE products. Only Magicstor (http://www.gs-magicstor.com) is selling one-inch drives to consumers.
The drive comes in the form of a CompactFlash (CF) type II card and will retail for US$200, and this will seriously impact the CompactFlash and USB pen drive markets.
CHANGING FLASH MARKET
Professional and high-end digital camera enthusiasts who now use CompactFlash for image storage will love micro drives because they are one-third the price of an equivalent CompactFlash card. These drives will also shake up the USB pen drive market. Pen drives are an amazing way to store and transfer data allowing, for example, a sales rep to easily load product specs onto a customer’s computer. JMTek’s 2GB USB pen drive retails for US$999, but take Magicstor’s 2GB CompactFlash disk drive, add a $20 CompactFlash reader and voilà, you have a USB mass storage device for $220. So Magicstor’s drive is really a three-in-one device: a CompactFlash card, USB mass storage device and even a hard disk for your notebook via a PC card. That’s three times the utility of a USB pen drive, which means dangerous times for USB drive makers.
NOTEBOOK DEATH
By 2007, one-inch drives will likely reach up to 20GB in capacity. The implications are staggering. A PDA-sized device — like the Handspring Treo or a Palm handheld — would allow users to carry all of their important files with them at all times. “But the keyboards on those devices are so small!” is likely your immediate reaction. iBiz (http://www.ibizcorp.com) has announced a virtual keyboard that projects a laser image of a keyboard onto a flat surface and captures letters as you type. And by then, processors will be so much more powerful that voice recognition will be a reality for small devices. We will also have an audio user interface, not just a graphical one. I already use Dragon Naturally Speaking, which enables my 2.9-pound notebook to take dictation at 160 words per minute with better than 99 per cent accuracy. And you can plug a small device into a large LCD screen. I predict that within five years I will be using one of these devices rather than a notebook as my primary computing device.
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