If you’ve owned a few digital cameras or PDAs and switched brands a couple of times over the years, you’ll probably already have a formidable collection of non-compatible memory cards wasting away in your drawer.
Looking around our office, we’ve acquired a mighty pile of chunky compact flash memory cards, Sony memory sticks in various flavours, SD cards and the fairly obscure XD format that was forced on us when we fell in love with the Fuji F11 camera.
Lord knows how much that lot costs us, but it looks like we might have to be dipping into our pockets yet again after Sony have released yet another version of their Memory Stick.
Designed for use in cellphones, the new Memory Stick Micro M2 measures in at just 15 x 12.5 x 1.2mm (about 1/4 the size of the Memory Stick Duo) and is set to compete against similarly Lilliputian formats like the MicroSD, MiniSD and TransFlash memory cards (an ‘M2’ adaptor will let users fit the new cards into Memory Stick PRO slots).
Developed by Sony and SanDisk the new card will ship in March and initially come in storage capacities of 256MB, 512MB and 1GB. In theory, the new Micro M2 cards will eventually be able to offer up to 32GB capacity.
Much as we hate to give any kudos to yet another memory card format, that’s a mighty impressive capacity and offers enough storage space to turn mobile phones into fully fledged, iPod-worrying MP3 players.
As is often Sony’s way, we expect consumers are unlikely to be given much choice whether they want to use the format or not with forthcoming Sony Ericsson handsets already using the format.
With the exception of occasional appearances on third party cameras and laptops, none of the various Memory Stick formats have found much favour with other manufacturers, so anyone tempted by the Sony Ericsson’s new range will have to fork out for yet another memory card format.
Thanks Sony.
As your collection of digital devices grows, you’ll probably find it near-impossible to stick with just the one memory card format as the pesky things keep on changing.
Getting data off these various cards usually means a trip to the back of the PC to install the various cables that came with all your camera/smartphone etc (when will they standardise all the ruddy USB connecters?!).
With most memory card readers offering support for a huge variety of memory cards, all you need to take on the road is a single USB lead to connect the card reader to your laptop and you’re sorted!
We were sadly guilty of leaving the charger for our Nikon N70 back in Blighty during out recent jaunt to NYC, and after seeing the battery levels accelerating downwards as we transferred zillions of images to our laptop, we shelled out for a cheap’n’cheerful Targus card reader, the TG-CRD14 ($25 street price).
Travelling photographers and road warriors should love the new credit-card sized USB key from LaCie, offering a massive storage capacity of either 4Gb (4,000Mb) or 8Gb (8,000Mb).
The shirt-pocket untroubling device can be used on both Macs (OS 9.x/10.x) and PCs (Windows 98SE through XP), with no additional software or drivers needed, although the credit-card sized storage device also ships with LaCie Silverlining and SilverKeeper drive management and backup utilities.
“Mobility, reliability, ease of use, capacity and price are the five main keys to consider when buying storage. We meet them all with the Carte Orange,” table-thumped Olivier Mirloup, LaCie Senior Product Manager.
Hard drives are soon to go the way of 8 track cartridges and steam powered radios according to Samsung’s semi-conductor CEO Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang.
With a cackle in his voice and a size nine sending a RAID array skywards, Hwang reckons that we’ll soon be seeing laptop memory cards with 32GB of memory, based on multiple 16Gb flash chips.
A big advantage of using flash memory in notebooks is that the technology is resistant to the sort of mechanical shocks that can often knacker a hard drive.
Toshiba claim a first with their release of what they claim is the first commercially released Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) hard drive.
They’re also using the drive to make their Gigabeat music player sexier. The introduction of PMR technology into the Gigabeat F41 not only gives them 40Gb of storage, from a previous 20Gb, but lets them shrink the thickness by 3m.
How does it work its magic? Today’s drives typically use Longitudinal Magnetic Recording (LMR). In simple terms, the difference between the two is LMR has the magnetic field pointing either left or right, while PMR has them pointing up or down. This helps to achieve higher and more stable recording densities, and in turn improves storage capacity. The images from Toshiba should help make it a bit clearer (if you happen to speak Japanese).
While the theory of PMR has been around for a number of years, Toshiba has taken 1-2 quarters longer than they’d expected in getting the MK4007GAL to market.
Microsoft ubermensch Bill Gates foresees mobile phones overtaking MP3s as the top choice among portable music players, while dismissing the popularity of Apple’s iPod player as unsustainable.
“If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates told the newspaper.
Samsung announces a prototype hard disk drive that includes flash memory, promising longer battery life and less hard disk woes for laptop users.
The hard disk would only spin up when the flash memory’s “write buffer” was full, reducing the time and power needed to keep the drive’s rotating media spinning.
A hard drive, containing confidential data belonging to the Brandenburg police in Germany, was auctioned over eBay and bought by a student from the city of Potsdam for €20 (us$25/£14) according to a report by Spiegel, a leading weekly German newspaper.
Last year, mobile security specialists Pointsec bought a load of hard drives off Internet auctions like eBay to find out how much sensitive company information they could unearth (and publicise their expertise in the bargain, natch).
A year after its launch, Google has doubled the capacity of its Gmail service and added new features.
Google is, however, aware that some crafty Gmail subscribers are using the service for this purpose, mailing files to themselves as a way of storing them online.
Curiously, Gmail is still technically in a beta phase, and is not generally available – the only way users can obtain a Gmail account is by invitation from an existing user (each current user has 50 invitations to give).
Memory card kings Lexar Media have teamed up with videogame big boys, Ubisoft, in a cunning piece of cross-market publicity.
Described as a “major value-add promotion” it looks more like the unexciting equivalent of a magazine freebie cover disk to us, but Theresa Boldrini, Lexar Director of Retail Marketing, can’t hold back her excitement:
And if all that wasn’t enough, a special Lexar promotion will offer consumers a free Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory t-shirt with the purchase of another Lexar product (be still my bearing heart!).