Ooo, its tiny!

    Are you tired of abundance of CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Minidisks and various other digital media carriers that are thrown all over your room? Behold, for a new format should arrive within few months – DataPlay disks.

    DataPlay has created very small, about the size of a large coin, disks that have 500 megabytes capacity. DataPlay disks can carry music, video, data, or any other file type. In order to be able to read the disk, you will need a special drive that gets connected to the PC via USB. The drive will act as an external drive when connected and as a standalone player otherwise. DataPlay compatible drives will be manufactured by DataPlay investors - Samsung, Toshiba and Matsushita [Panasonic], as well as several other third-party companies. The drives will cost between 300 and 370 US dollars and will be available in retail as soon as May 2002. Some models will feature small LCD displays that could be used to watch movies or music videos.

    Dataplay is planning to push its new format primarily through the [bloody] RIAA: they plan to sell MP3 albums along with music videos of popular artists, such as Britney Spears. There are rumors of Olympus releasing a DataPlay-compatible digital camera. Well, good luck to them!

    DataPlay drives use micro optics and can write at higher speeds than that of regular CD-Rs. There are no rewritable disks available, however, all DataPlay disks are multi-session capable. The pricing on the disks remains shady however: DataPlay website states “around 10 US dollars retail price”. Are they out of their minds? 10 bucks – is that for a pack of 10 disks? Otherwise, it is very unclear how they are planning to compete with C disks, which are 15 times cheaper and have larger capacity.

    Will DataPlay sell? That’s a two-sided question. Analysts from companies with big names are predicting a miserable failure – at least in the first several years. DataPlay has two major drawbacks: firstly, it is a very new format that requires new drives, new media, and is not wide-spread; secondly, it has a built in copyright protection technology which lets you write a “pirated” MP3 file to the device, but does not let you copy it back off onto another device [such as a computer]. A very odd way to try to get customers to say the least... Well, they probably would have not been able to sign a contract with EMI and RIAA if they did not do that.

    As long as there is some sort of blocks on what I can or cannot copy onto that device, I wont buy it.