Now that the company is finally taken seriously, Iomega Corp wants to build quickly on its hard-won advantage. In addition to a 200Mb version of its Zip floppy cartridge drive, the company says it is hard at work on a cartridge floppy drive appropriate for digital cameras and other consumer devices, which will use a disk 1.8 or 2 in diameter and store 20Mb. It says the drive, called n*hand, could store 200 compressed pictures in future digital cameras, and be used for storage of voice mail and phone numbers in cellular telephones and data and software in palmtop computers. We think you will most likely see products using n*hand in the first quarter of 1998, Iomega marketing manager Tim Hill told Reuters, adding that drives that n*hand drives could add $100 or so to cameras, phones or palmtops, and that disks would cost about $15 each. Iomega aims to reduce the price of a 100Mb ZIP drive over the next year or so to $100 from the current $300, Hill said.
