Smartphones moving to fancier flash drives

The manufacturers of memory chips flash drives will be more demanding on mobile devices - technology, which was comparable to that Solid State Drives drives in laptops today.
The Palm comes with a pre 8GB Memory Flash Disk Flash drive manufacturers like Micron Technology is a challenge for the market of flash drives future mobile phone.

The Palm comes with a pre 8GB Memory Flash Disk Flash drive manufacturers like Micron Technology is a challenge for the market of flash drives future mobile phone.
(Credit: Palm)

Flash drives today, which usually go up to 32GB capacity in products like Apple's iPhone, often using relatively simple techniques for reading and writing data. In general, technology is not very different from that used in mobile phones for basic and digital cameras, according to Brian Shirley, Vice President of Micron's memory group.

But how smartphones - and possibly future tablet devices - devices more and more like the personal computer and less like an MP3 player base, manufacturers of memory chips begin to ask the flash memory, "said Shirley in a telephone interview.

"In almost all MP3 players, it is almost exclusively" raw "NAND. And at some point we expect to move more of a managed NAND, "said Shirley. This type of NAND flash memory used in all the flash cards and SSDs.

Managed NAND is somewhere between simple flash drives - such as Secure Digital or SD cards - and expensive drives solid state (SSD), with laptops and servers. "It's something between the first NAND we have discussed above for cell phones and MP3 players, and adult SSD space," says Shirley.

"We believe that this will be quite busy (market) space in 2010, he added.

Solid-State Drives in laptops like the MacBook Air from Apple and Dell Adamo used, their performance edge, sophisticated firmware and controller chips, which are managed, how data is read and recorded. Although managed NAND would not necessarily achieve that degree of perfection, he began his approach.

The iPhone uses raw NAND with an independent auditor, according to Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights, the research works on flash memory technology.

"They may have control over it, and the flash controller, so they can boost performance," he said. "They are very aware of the differentiation of their products. The user interface is what matters to them. That means that your music or video downloads very quickly, if you can find the data very quickly - that ties in how they manage the NAND, "he said.

But Apple is looking for better performance, as it seems very effective strategy of manufacturing its various products continues Wong.

Netbooks and the future can this type of flash memory. Netbooks are now using Intel Atom processors and Windows operating system, almost exclusively disks. But a new category of netbooks synchronized SmartBooks - equipment that is always on, always connected, and provide all the battery life day - should come in 2010 to market the package of flash drives. These smaller models can be run as a candidate for NAND.