Sony Ericsson has coined the Cybershot name into its mobile phones as early as they were confident that the quality of photos matched their point and shoot line. Correct me if I’m wrong but this happened when the autofocus feature was introduced into their cam-phones. Today, SE goes further with their C905 Cybershot that comes with a 8.1MP camera with the real flash you find in today’s modern P&S’s. It also comes with a 2.4 inch screen - that’s a whee bit less of a DSLR’s LCD!

So is it a camera or a phone? We don’t really know anymore. Does this eat into the market of their point and shoots? Probably. Probably not. There has to be a catch somewhere and it might have to do with battery life or processing speed. All we know is that this thing is coming in the end game of Q4 2008.

[Photo and news credit]

My co-editor Art wrote a very interesting piece on the future of flash-based technology for laptops. Following the trend of the migration of HD-based hardware storage to flash-based storage, it should logically follow suit that flash technology should get better and cheaper as time progresses.

The iPod nano was testament to this migration. Though the nano’s baby brother (iPod shuffle) possesses a relatively huge amount of memory (1GB), the nano has proven that flash storage can grow exponentially (maximum iPod nano storage is currently at 4GB) as well as become cheaper in the long run.

Art explains further:

Two trends in particular will make this happen:

o Flash drives, which are solid-state memory devices, are now improving technologically at a rate that is faster than Moore’s Law (which states that computer technologies double in performance very 18 months). The iPod nano introduced us to the 4GB flash drive. But by late 2008, we can expect to see 32GB flash drives at the least. And when that happens, we will see the first attempts at replacing laptop hard drives with flash drives.

0 Processor manufacturers are now realizing the need for cooler-running mobile chips. To date, the emphasis has always been on faster processors that consume greater amounts of power (and therefore heat up more). But the growing emphasis on mobile computing has been gradually changing the mindset of processor-makers, and we may soon see high-performance chips that can survive on passive cooling solutions (i.e. no fans necessary) alone.

[Read the full entry here c/o the mPH blog]