Sony to sell media on ubersmall USB drives

Posted December 10, 2006 at 06:03 PM by Adam Berger

Section: Audio, Portable Audio, Online Music/Video, Content

What you see above are not just some colorful super-small USB drives on a colorful background. These mini USB drives, dubbed the Sony Micro Vault (aka, the Pocket Bit Mini, in Japan), will soon come loaded with content and replace CDs as the media of choice—if Sony has their way.

“Amid the rapid advancement of size reduction in the Walkman, viewer terminals and other compact products, we judged that USB memory could be applied for such products only if it were smaller. In addition, given the growing capacity of flash memory, technical circumstances were about to mature for us to realize a small-size, large-capacity USB memory device”—Takeshi Funabashi

What do you think? Online media sales are doing well but CDs and DVDs still get sold in stores. There is also a major format war going on that involves hard media. Will these new tiny storage devices succeed in content distribution or is Sony behind the ball again, wasting their time on hardware instead of focusing on software?

Read [Tech On]