Hard Drive Storage in Handheld Applications

I am a big fan of the handheld PDA's for measurement applications. They provide a commercial standard for building measurement tools. The display is good enough, the processor is getting better every year, and so is the battery life. One weakness of the handheld is the permanent storage capacity. While one can buy add-on cards, the storage doesn't seem to be sizable.

I recently purchased an IPOD and found it quite an attractive package of a miniaturized hard drive. IPODs sell in large quantities and certainly qualifies for a commercially available technology. It's now seen almost everywhere. What if the stoarge of the IPOD could be packaged with the CPU, Display, and RAM of the Handheld PDA? This would provide tremendous data storage capability for handheld applications without resorting to custom device development.

Today I read a news release from Samsung that they will build a mobile phone with a 1.5 Gigabyte hard drive. The SPH-V5400 model phone will sell for about $800. The inclusion of a hard drive opens the mobile phone/handheld device to many new applications. If you are working the area of handhelds and have thoughts about the need for data storage, I would like to hear from you. Please email me at hall.martin@ni.com.