Ian Vogelesang, VP of strategy and planning at the San Jose, California-based HDD manufacturer, said the rationale for drives in mobile handsets was a compelling one.

We already have high-refresh and high-resolution screens, so a disk drive would be a logical accompaniment if the [mobile] phone is to become a converged personal entertainment device, he said. You could accumulate content on a phone for watching it when you’re mobile, then play it to a regular TV set via cradle or Bluetooth when back at home.

This is only on the consumer electronics side, of course, but microdrives in PDAs or mobile handsets could also have applications in the business world too. They could contain clients for remote working, or even for security functions when connecting to the corporate network, for instance, and could make the phone a convenient way of carrying around a PowerPoint presentation instead of a laptop computer, for instance.

Vogelesang noted that Samsung has already demo’ed a phone fitted with a 1-inch drive and is thought to be working on a 0.85-inch one along with Toshiba, while direct competitors of Hitachi in HDD like Seagate and Western Digital have announced 1-inch drives. Hitachi’s offering in this space is the 1-inch Mikey drive announced in January for shipment in the second half, with a capacity in the 8GB-10GB range and still to be determined.

As for the smaller device Samsung and Toshiba are working on, Hitachi’s EMEA client executive Mac Motraghi predicted it could run into problems at its 2GB capacity level, because there it will have to compete with CompactFlash products.

While its 1.8-inch drives will find their way into MP3 and other so-called personal media players (PMPs) and its larger devices, the 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives, will go into personal video recorders (PVRs) and set-top boxes (STBs), Vogelesang said the 1-inch microdrives won’t see massive take-up in mobile handsets until current battery issues have been resolved. You can currently only watch a couple of movies before needing to recharge your battery, he explained.

There is already work underway on technologies to replace the convention lithium iron polymer battery, with Hitachi investigating methanol-based fuel cells, but they’re not quite there yet, Vogelesang acknowledged.