No More HDD iPods?

It is possible that the entire iPod line could be converted to NAND flash memory by the end of the year. This what Jesse Tortora, an analyst from Prudential Equity Group believes. It makes perfect sense too.

With flash-based players, you're going to get an upgrade in two of the most important aspects of your mp3 player; durability and battery life. To give you an example of the increase in battery life, a 30GB HDD iPod will get roughly 3.5 hours of video playback out of each charge. If you took that same 30GB iPod and put in a flash-based storage drive, you could get around 5.5 hours.

The only setback with this transition is going to be the price. Hard disk drives cost less to produce than current flash storage. But I would gladly pay a few extra bucks to know that it's going to last longer, and I'm not going to have to recharge as often.

Apple may ax next-gen HDD iPod in favor of all-flash models [via appleinsider]