Sony has an 8GB flash player coming?
Looks like where Apple shuts a Samsung door, Sony opens a Samsung window -- after Apple backed out of its $3.8 billion NAND flash memory joint-venture with Samsung amidst a Korean FTC investigation (its American counterpart investigation yielded a $300m fine for DRAM price-fixing) and managing to arouse the ire of a flock of device manufacturers, things perhaps seemed a little hard going for the memory giant. Until now, anyway, since reports have begun to surface about Sony signing on to snap up as much as a fifth of all of Samsung's NAND flash memory supplies (not entirely surprising after their announcement last month of another joint-venture between the pair). What's more, apparently reports are surfacing that Sony plans to take advantage of all this memory on an 8GB audio player (among other things) which we can only presume would be poised to move in on the sweet-spot Apple left open after making the nano only 2GB and 4GB. Could this also lead to the solid-state drive-based PSP we've all been not-so-secretly longing for? Well, any capacious Sony flash player still seems a bit like speculation to us, but in any case, until Sony carries Apple's cachet in portable audio, if they want to make a dent in iPod sales they're going to have to do more than just whip up a device equipped with 8GB of solid state memory.
[Via Newratings]
