DataPlay Shows Breakthrough in Storage Media

LAS VEGAS -- You love your digital camera, but you wish it could hold a few more images. And you love your portable MP3 player, but it would be nice if it could store a few more songs.

DataPlay has a solution for your storage woes. Here at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company unveiled a new storage medium that promises to bring new levels of storage to many portable devices.

DataPlay's optical technology crams as much as 500MB of data onto a disc about the size of a postage stamp--enough space to store several albums' worth of music.

The discs are expected to retail for as little as $5 to $10 when they begin shipping in the second half of this year, and could offer a low-cost alternative to the flash memory cards widely used in portable gadgets today.

Prototype devices on show in DataPlay's booth here included a 3-megapixel digital camera from Toshiba, and digital music players from the SonicBlue (formerly known as S3) Rio division, Samsung Electronics, Ritek, and others.

The products include a special bay to accommodate DataPlay's discs, and for the most part will start shipping in the second half of this year, representatives from those companies say.

Portable Player

San Diego, California-based E.Digital was the first company to make a working media player device based on DataPlay's technology. E.Digital also helped Toshiba and Samsung on their respectively branded media players.

E.Digital's DataPlay-enabled portable jukebox on display at CES includes a 10GB hard drive capable of storing more than 3000 CD-quality songs in a unit about the size of a deck of cards. Known as Tréo, the device should appear in the U.S. for under $400 by the end of the first quarter of this year.

As well as allowing consumers to store data on the discs themselves, DataPlay's storage format will allow recording companies to preload their music on the discs, which DataPlay hopes will pave the way for some compelling applications.

For example, a user might buy a disc with five albums by a particular artist on it, but pay for only one of those albums at the time of purchase.

If the user likes the album, he or she could pay to "unlock" the other albums stored on the disc by making a transaction over the Internet, saving them the trouble of going back to the store, DataPlay officials say. The discs include built-in copy protection using the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) standard.

"Besides other music, you could also unlock music videos or interviews," says Raymond Uhlir, vice president of marketing at DataPlay. "You're not going to be getting a CD with just music on it anymore."

More Storage Options

For users who don't have DataPlay-compatible devices, Imation announced a product here at CES that will allow users on the road to transfer data from flash memory cards onto a DataPlay disc. Called the DiscGo, the product is expected to be available in the fourth quarter priced between $200 and $300, an Imation representative here says.

DataPlay's disc can also be used for storing text in electronic books or as a stand-alone product for offloading music and video files onto a PC hard drive.

The DataPlay product will compete with a raft of alternatives including SD (Secure Digital) memory cards from Panasonic, Toshiba, and SanDisk; Sony's MemoryStick; Iomega's Clik drive; and IBM's new MicroDrive.

Nonvolatile flash memory cards typically retail for about $3 per megabyte, and the cards aren't expected to reach 256MB until later this year. Iomega's Clik drive is slightly larger than DataPlay's technology and is priced at $10 for a 40MB card.