Hey, buddy! Need a miniature optical format for media? It’s small, it can hold 1 gigabyte, and it uses a mechanical playback system. Sounds great, right?
Vmedia, who apparently slipped Laptop’s Joanna Stern some loopy juice in hopes of getting positive coverage, is trying to release a mini optical format that is about as big as an SD card and will cost somewhat (read: not much) less than standard flash media.
Will it fly? Absolutely not. First, people will want a DVD/CD optical drive – if they want a drive at all – not some half-assed version of UMD. Spice Mobile tried this in India with cellphones and I can’t imagine it turned out very well. Every few months a CE manufacturer looks at the numbers and says “We can make our shitty product into a value play. People with no money will buy it.” Wrong. People with no money don’t buy for value, they buy for longevity. If I’m on a set budget, I want the best that money can buy (which is what Sony and Samsung base their marketing strategies on, incidentally), and I don’t settle for also-ran tech like this.
I’m sorry, guys, but this is total garbage.
I believe it’s about 10 years too late. When this article came up, I thought, “Oh, that’s cool!” But then thinking it over, flash memory media is a lot more useful, cheaper, no moving parts, so-on and so-on. It reminds of the days of ZIP drives. When I was in college, everyone had a ZIP drive and disks. All of our computers in our lab had them and it was the only way to transfer files. Now, my external USB ZIP drive sits in a small box with about 10 disks somewhere in the garage.