Samsung, the company responsible for more than half of the world's NAND flash market, is planning to launch a new flash chip next year with storage capacity of 16Gibibit - what most of us would think of as 2Gigabyte.
Samsung's current flash chips are used in a wide range of devices, most notably Apple's flash-based iPod music players. The new NAND flash memory will lead to yet more storage capacity from popular MP3 players.
However, the higher capacity chips could also pave the way for hard-drive free laptops. Capacity, price and transfer speeds have stopped flash based storage taking off in devices like laptops, but technological developments are closing the gap between them and hard drives. The power requirements of a flash device, which has no moving parts, will be most favourable for laptops, increasing battery life.
More info over at Reuters.
