Cell Phones With Hard Drives Could Oust MP3 Player Sales
May 10th , 2006
 In
a study released on thursday, ABI Research claims that
cell phones with hard disks could severely hurt MP3 player
sales. As the memory capacity of cell phones (in storage
of MP3 files and songs) increases, the demand for MP3
players will decrease.
An example of a phone with hard drive
is the Samsung SPH-V5400 that comes with a 1.5GB hard
drive. Nokia N91 is expected to be released with a hard
drive capacity of 4GB while Samsung SGH-i310 has 8GB capacity.
Alan Varghese, ABI Research's principal
analyst quotes, "As the cellular handset becomes
the one device that the world carries, the standalone
MP3 player may well be left behind. What's important to
many users is having one device that handles mobile music
as well as the other functions-phone calls, digital photography,
email, web browsing-now performed by cell phones."
At the moment, the 8 or 4GB storage
capacity we see in the above cell phone models does not
pose a big threat to MP3 players because they come with
capacities ranging from 30-60GB. However, Varghese believes
there will come a point when consumers do not care whether
the phone can store 2000 songs or 5000 songs. This point
is called the margin of diminishing returns.
What's more, most people carry around
their cell phone, and not their MP3 player. So why not
have just one device (the cell phone), equipped with an
MP3 player, rather than carrying around a standalone MP3
player?
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