History 2004: Cell Phone Market, New Eldorado for Flash and HDDs?

The arrival of cell phones that integrate high-end functionality such as gaming, MP3 players and most prominently, still and moving image photography, with integrated cameras or camcorders, will no doubt oblige manufacturers to find a way to integrate substantially greater memory capacity in their products, at levels where the HDD will no doubt cost less than flash memory.

And yet, given that one-inch drives are slightly too large to place in a cell phone already crammed full with electronic components, why not opt for a 0.85-inch unit, embedded or used via a card slot? There’s food for thought for potential manufacturers of the tiny drives.

According to IDC, the market for mobile phones will grow to over 798 million units by 2008 and mobile phones with card slots will reach 157.3 million in 2004 and 246.8 million in 2005.

A 0.85 HDD will cost more than its one-inch counterpart, at least initially, for half the capacity (not more than 4GB).

What’s more, reliability is reduced, and power consumption greater.

Will the sole criteria of price-per-gigabyte predominate? IDC analysts Alex Slawsby and Dave Reinsel are not at all convinced, and conclude their in-depth study as follows: “Although the potential for including HDDs within mobile phones has captured the imaginations of mobile phone and HDD vendors around the world, the reality must balance out the hype. The sheer WW volume of mobile phone shipments attracts hardware and software vendors like few other industries, but some solutions encounter significant barriers when injected within the mobile phone paradigm. The HDD is a solution designed for a full computing paradigm, a paradigm significantly different from that of the mobile phone … Unless a clear business purpose arises for such enabled devices or an unexpected improvement occurs in HDD technology, demand for these devices will be limited to a specific few models within the datacentric converged mobile device category through 2008.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 199 on August 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.