Mobile phones with Toshiba harddrives?

[Colin Dunstan]

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!

[TadW]

What is the problem with flash devices?

[Pride Of Lions]

From what I understand, hard drives are most susceptible to failing when either reading or writing to the disk if a hard shock (like a fall) happens. If this is true, aren't we asking a lot of our devices to get smaller and faster but, somehow, more durable?

I'm better about not dropping my phone like I used to, but one drop at a wrong time could conceivably ruin a very expensive deivce.

A hard disk in a PDA makes a little more sense to me because of the multimedia aspects and capabilities of our newer PDA's. And I don't drop my PDA as much as I used to drop my phone, but the risk is still there.

Also, don't hard drives have heat displacement issues that flash drives don't have? And higher battery needs than flash drives?
POL9A