memorial

It's official: Flash MP3 players are taking over. SanDisk has just announced a new version of the Sansa View...one with 32GB of built-in flash memory. Ah, it makes me nostalgic--remember the days of 30GB hard-drive MP3 players? Oh, right, those still exist. The player isn't far off, either: the expected launch date is in February of this year. SanDisk will also be releasing a 12GB microSD card later in 2008, meaning you could end up with a whopping 44GB capacity all told. In true SanDisk style, the new View is priced to sell at $349. It's … Read more

Financing has been cut by about half for a partnership by Intel, ST Microelectronics, and Francisco Partners to launch a flash memory company called Numonyx, the companies said Wednesday. In addition, the company, called Numonyx, won't be established until early 2008, under a revised schedule.

Initially, Numonyx was to have received up to $1.55 billion in debt financing. The companies have revised financing terms so Numonyx now has a $650 million loan and $100 million revolving credit facility, Intel said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

STMicroelectronics added in a statement that the companies … Read more

Memory makers expect big changes in the DRAM market when top notebook vendors start rolling out laptops with significantly more memory. Vendors such as Dell, HP, and Toshiba are expected to start pushing laptops with 4GB of RAM next year, four times the current mainstream spec of 1GB. Memory module makers say even with that boost, falling memory prices mean that memory will account for even less of the cost of a laptop than before.

Read more at DigiTimes.

Using a specialized camera, an entire day's events can be captured digitally on a memory card and downloaded onto a PC for subsequent viewing.

Read the full story at MIT Technology Review: "A camera to help dementia patients "

A long-running California lawsuit over whether all megabytes and gigabytes are created equal may have reached its end on Friday.

The class action lawsuit against Kodak, Sandisk, Lexar Media, and other memory card makers alleges that the defendants intentionally misrepresented the capacity of their flash memory devices by using decimal definitions, in which a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The suit says a binary definition is appropriate, meaning that one megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes and that the memory card sizes were overstated by 4 percent to 5 percent.

When memory capacity was smaller, the difference didn't … Read more

The most remarkable thing about this particular item is that it's the first silly USB flash drive dubbed a "luxury item" we've seen in more than a month--which, as these annoying keys go, is an eternity. Yet the "SwissMemory Prestige" is in a class by itself.

Where to begin? The cost, for one--ranging in the gold and diamond versions from $3,200 to $6,000 for 1GB of storage, which is hardly anything these days. Second, their designs don't exactly lend themselves to elegant wearable jewelry. And third, as Chip Chick rightly points … Read more

Hey, congrats on the new digital camera you snagged cheap on Black Friday (or Cyber Monday, or Fairly Ordinary Saturday). Now you just need a high-capacity memory card to store all your snapshots. How does a free one sound? Well, okay, the A-Data 2GB Secure Digital card will cost you $19 up front, but you'll get it back in 6-8 weeks. Yep, it's one of those free-after-rebate deals. Of course, even if you're one of those lazy types who never remembers to submit the forms until the day after the cutoff, $19 is still a pretty good … Read more

Sure, the latest iPod nano is crazy-cool, but it's still another gadget you have to tote around. Why not use the phone that's already in your pocket? Plenty of models can pull double duty as MP3 players, meaning all you need for mobile-music goodness is a high-capacity memory card.

eCost has a Patriot 4GB MiniSD card for $26.99 (after a $20 mail-in rebate), which should hold about 1,000 MP3s. Just make sure your phone does indeed have a MiniSD slot and not a MicroSD slot, and that it supports SDHC cards. The Patriot comes with an … Read more

Power Downloader uses several types of software throughout his day including word processors, mapping programs, database apps, and even a few games during break time to let off some steam. In his endless hunt for top-notch applications, Power also ends up using a few programs that aren't all they were cracked up to be. With all the software Power sifts through, it should come as no surprise that some apps even have memory leaks that end up slowing down his system to a crawl. As a software superhero, a slow system simply will not suffice.… Read more