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LAS VEGAS -- Sony is enlisting support from other vendors in its battle to make its Memory Stick reign supreme in the removable memory market.

The company, which has been battling alone since the 1998 launch of Memory Stick against formats with wider industry support, is demonstrating here a selection of products from other manufacturers based on its memory card format.

Sony has licensed Memory Stick to 116 companies, with around 50 products and prototypes on display at Comdex this week. The products range from a Linux-based personal digital assistant from Taiwan's Acer to a car navigation system that reads GPS data from Memory Stick made by Alpine Electronics.

Can't Go It Alone

Getting more support for Memory Stick from other companies is vital if Sony it wants the format to be more widely used. Until now it has been alone in promoting the format and has managed to carve out a sizable share of the market, but it needs the support of others to take the format further, says Ryoji Sato, manager of the Memory Stick promotion planning group at Sony in Tokyo. (See "Sony's Memory Stick Gets Stickier.")

"In the Japanese domestic market, the Memory Stick already has almost 30 percent market share after SmartMedia and CompactFlash in terms of the number of cards sold," Sato says.

Sony hopes that by bringing other manufacturers on board it can edge out SmartMedia and CompactFlash for the number-one position and head off recently launched formats such as MultiMediaCard and Secure Digital.

Like the two newcomers, one version of Memory Stick also supports copy protection--which Sato says was considered for the format at its start in 1998.

"At that time Noboyuki Idei asked us to include copyright protection technologies in the announcement," he says. "Most of us couldn't understand why copyright protection was needed but now that content distribution is getting popular, we understand the importance." (Idei was Sony's company president.)

Sony bundles support for its own Magic Gate copy protection system in white-colored Memory Stick cards.

Capacity Continues to Grow

Sato says Sony expects to ship a 128MB card next spring and a 1GB version by 2003. The company predicts 100 million Memory Stick products will have shipped by then.

Besides showing third-party applications for Memory Stick, Sony is demonstrating a range of peripherals that use the Memory Stick interface.

It first disclosed plans to use the Memory Stick interface as more than a port for memory cards in late August when it launched its Clie personal digital assistant. (See "Sony Takes On Palm With Clie PDA.") Sony has in mind a range of peripheral products, and some of its first working prototypes are on display at Comdex. (See "Sony Shows Tiny Camera.")

In addition to showing a functional digital still camera module, Sony has a GPS module and a fingerprint identification module. All three are expected to hit the market in 2001, says a Sony spokeperson. Pricing is not yet available.

The devices will also work with compliant cellular telephones, PCs, and other devices, Sony officials say.

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