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A Flashy New Media Player

Techstination feature for Tuesday, August 23, 2005

A flashy new media player. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. With Apple at the top of the heap in the portable music player business, thanks mostly to its big capacity hard drive based iPods. Samsung is betting on flash memory to help it take some of that business away. Senior product marketing manager Mark Farish …

"Samsung's competitive advantage is going to be in flash. A lot of our competitors actually purchase flash from Samsung. So really the direction we're going to go is we'll start to offer higher capacity flash based products in the future as well as now. Right now, we have in the market 2 gigabyte. In the future we're going to be coming out with 4, 6 and hopefully even 8 gigabyte flash based pieces."

Samsung brought in its cell phone design team to help build a new video and music player that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive…the YPT8…which is scheduled to arrive next month…

"It's the perfect little piece to take out and around with the ergonomic design and just show people all of your favorite content. So it's basically music, movies, text files, JPEG viewing and more. It's going to be one of the first multimedia flash based devices that are going to be in market this fall."

One of the downsides is Samsung did not build in a memory card expansion slot. A one gigabyte version of the player will sell for about 250 dollars. A model with double the capacity will be about 50 dollars more. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.