For this reason the company, with joint HQs in Tokyo and Stockholm, has included a 0.2GB Memory Stick in one of the handsets it launched yesterday, the W800, said Steve Walker, head of product marketing.
The new handset is primarily for the consumer market and marks Sony Ericsson’s first foray into music on handsets, leverage its Japanese parent’s Walkman brand for the purpose.
On the 0.5GB Memory Stick you can get up to 12 CDs, and since the medium is removable, you can go up to 4GB of storage, he said.
Earlier this week, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc, the HDD division of Hitachi, argued the main obstacle to wide-scale adoption of microdrives in mobile devices was current battery lives, which limit the amount of time a handset could be used for, say, watching movies, even though a microdrive could hold a lot more. It is presently researching fuel cell technology as a successor to lithium iron polymer batteries.
Walker agreed that battery life is a factor, though he questioned whether, in the consumer market, anyone would want to watch large numbers of films on a very small screen anyway. He added that solid state wins in this context, because it is less power consuming that disk drives, which have to be spun.
However, the main obstacle to microdrive technology in mobile phones, in his opinion, was durability.
Phones get dropped, thrown and kicked, and microdrives currently aren’t that durable, he said. That said, he acknowledged that Sony Ericsson is considering microdrive technology and should make a decision relatively soon.
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As for the business user, Sony Ericsson presently serves that market with its P910 smart phone with PDA functionality, launched late last year, as well as its 3G/EDGE data card, unveiled at last month’s 3GSM show in Cannes, France.
Walker said the former is positioned primarily for mobile email and basic surfing and thus has relatively little requirement for local storage. Beyond that, the laptop with a data card is the optimum solution for things like Word or PowerPoint work.
