"There's plenty of good news for buyers: Larger capacities in everything from CompactFlash to Secure Digital media should decrease the number of cards you have to carry by letting you load up far more music, photos, and other files per card. What's more, even the smallest of cards are getting smarter--the postage stamp-size Secure Digital cards have recently added I/O functionality (see " The Tiniest Peripherals: SDIO"), opening the door to new types of add-in cards for compact audio players and cellular telephones, as well as to multiple slots on larger handheld devices such as Palm and PocketPC PDAs....
A part of flash memory's strength is its increasing capacity, coupled with its ever-decreasing size and cost. Just one year ago, CompactFlash cards topped out at 512MB or so. Today, these commonly used cards can hold about a gigabyte of data--that's hundreds or even thousands of digital photos, depending on their resolution and compression, or dozens of CDs' worth of compressed audio.
Though other formats are more limited by their physical dimensions--at least until higher-capacity flash memory chips appear--they're getting roomier, too. For example, according to a source at flash-memory maker SanDisk, even the petite Secure Digital cards should have reached 256MB by the time you read this. A source at the SD Association says 512MB cards should follow shortly, and SanDisk says versions as large as 4GB may be ready within a year or two." [PC World]
Second, this article notes that there are currently five formats for flash memory. And the entertainment industry thinks the tech companies are going to agree to implement one standard in one way? Even if they do, how can they guarantee a digital file will work across all of them? The answer is they can't, so consumers will lose.
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