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]

[Ed @ Dec 27th 2005 10:43AM]

I don't know how Apple shut a Samsung door when they recently "reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba"



http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/21flash.html



Also, did Apple "back out of their deal", or was that just a rumor?

[Mike @ Dec 27th 2005 1:20PM]

I wouldn't be too worried. Sony manages to screw up at every given turn and all their gear is overpriced.



So what if they have an 8gig player? If it's anything like their current DAP's, I wouldn't lose any sleep if I were in Steve Jobs' shoes.



I'm confident that Apple still has enough of the NAND market that they'll enjoy a comfortable lead for quite some time.

[JPolsk @ Dec 28th 2005 12:11AM]

I find it fascinating that the article is about a product that used to use a hard drive but now uses solid state memory, and the photo depicts a device that used to use solid state memory and now features a hard drive. ;)

[TheWakeUpCall @ Dec 28th 2005 7:53AM]

Why is there a pic of a 16GB flash card then?

[E @ Dec 30th 2005 9:44AM]

I have a video 60gig iPod, pretty happy with it, I do have some issues with it. I wouldn't give a crap who makes the next revolution of personal media players.



But... Seriously.



Why would you "worry" about the possibility that Sony, Samsung etc... might eventually have a better device than Apple?? THAT'S the first thing that comes to mind is "worry"? Sony used to be the shit when it came to portable audio. Now it's Apple, and that will probably change sometime in the future too.



You dorks need to get a life.