Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
PC and flash memory manufacturer, Samsung Electronics plans to release two notebook PCs within weeks that will use flash memory instead of hard drives as storage. Each model will have 32 Gbytes of flash storage, comparable to the capacity of magnetic disk based hard drives, but with much lower power consumption.
The notebooks, the Samsung Q1 and Q30, will be relatively expensive at
US$2,430 and US$3,700 and, for reasons of its own, Samsung has
initially decided to make them available only in its home base of
Korea. However, there is no doubt that the Japanese and US markets are
ripe for this type of technoloy and it will eventually be on the market.
Flash has been touted as a possible replacement of hard drive
technology for years but the issues of cost and read-write lifespan
have been inhibitors. Magnetic drives are cheaper and can currently
pack more storage per dollar but, because they involve moving parts,
they consumer more power, are noiser and slower to access data.
The new Samsung notebooks are relatively modest lowly configured PCs
with small low resolution screens, which is why at their premium prices
they probably why they won't be marketed in the sophisticated consumer
markets of the US and Japan. However, with the concept demonstrated in
the commercial marketplace, consumer demand for diskless notebook PCs
could well be on the rise and prices will drop.
New vertical drive technology, which enables up to 750 Gbytes of data
to be stored on a single disk, will keep the magnetic disk around for a
while yet. However, a few years ago the concept of having 32 Gbytes of
flash storage at an affordable price seemed beyond the realm of
possibility. With no moving parts, lower power consumption and superior
performance, eventually solid state storage will replace magnetic
disks, at least in portable devices. It's just a matter of when.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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