July 2005 Mnemonic Devices By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
THE WILD SUCCESS OF APPLE'S iPod music player is based on lots of ingredients, but one of the least obvious of them is about to give a boost to some other portable devices and may just turn these gadgets into competitors to the iPod itself. I'm talking about the little hard-disk drive at the iPod's heart. It's physically small enough to fit inside a handheld gadget, yet large enough in terms of capacity to store thousands of songs. Back in 2001, the iPod was the first widely sold product to use one of these little hard disks. With a diameter of just under 2 inches, it's smaller than the hard drives used in most laptops, yet it can hold up to 60 gigabytes of data, or around 15,000 songs. The midsize iPod Mini uses an even smaller version, albeit with decreased capacity. It's just an inch in diameter but holds up to 6 gigabytes of data, enough for around 1,500 songs. (The low-end iPod Shuffle doesn't use a hard disk, and it holds relatively few songs in its memory chips.) But now these little hard disks are migrating to other devices - including cellphones and personal digital assistants - made by other companies, giving these gadgets some of the iPod's magical combination of diminutive size and expansive capacity. And since these devices can play music, along with the various other functions they perform, they could soon become a challenge to the iPod. ... http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/report-200507.html Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _______________________________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
