Phone with tiny (I mean, absolutely minute) hard disk

Toshiba has created a hard disk so small that six could fit on a business card. They plan to implant it into phones, giving them greater scope as music players. (picture from vnunet.com)









At the moment, its not actually that exciting, as the capacity is only 4GB, which is no better than flash memory chips which have no moving parts, so are more robust. However, with perpendicular recording techniques coming in for hard disks, Toshiba reckon that they will be able to fit 10GB on the tiny device. That would make it a great option for phone music players.

While we're on this subject, I thought I would share my views with you on the subject of phones with mp3 playback. The only way that this particular convergence is going to have great success is if the phone is implanted into the music player rather than the other way around. In the age of bluetooth headsets, it would not be necessary to clamp the entire mp3 player to your ear.

For example, think how desirable an 'iPod Nano Mobile' would be (certainly much more so than their feeble ROKR). Just a little suggestion to Apple, why not use the click-wheel to dial, as on the old fashioned phones with the dialling wheel? If they did that, I'd be their first customer.