Toshiba announced at CES last week that it will be shipping its mobile phone-oriented 2GB, 0.85in hard drive by the end of January. And according to
The Register, a 4GB version will ship mid-year, with 6GB and 8GB drives shipping in 2006.
Toshiba is pitching the part at "next-generation mobile digital devices", but it's a good bet phone makers are going to take a keen interest in the drive, particularly given the clear convergence between handsets, PDAs and, increasingly, digital media players. Toshiba's hard drives may enable handset makers to incorporate large storage capacities more cost-effectively than they can with Flash-based memory cards, and potentially reach higher capacities more quickly.
I was never a big fan of flash devices, so I hope that PPC vendors will incorporate these harddisk drives soon!