Just as you thought your phone had every feature crammed inside it’s little case, a company has to come along and say “hold on, there’s no Blu-Ray in that phone yet”. Vmedia have created an amazing 32mm diameter optical disc that can fit a full feature length movie on to it in 576p resolution. The tiny optical disc is to be found inside a small cartridge in a similar way to Sony’s Mini Disc (but smaller) and it uses blue laser technology. The capacity of the first single layer discs will be 1GB and this will be doubled to 2GB when the dual layer version becomes available which is expected to be in 2009.
Vmedia have made the whole system be available as a package to mobile phone manufacturers. The component is easy to integrate and is designed to be used in mobile phone, hence, it can be beaten up, dropped and should still function. Power for the device shouldn’t be a concern as it has been designed with low power consumption in mind. Later in 2008 a newer 2nd gen player will be launched which will be just 9.5mm thick.
Normally I would recommend waiting for such a device to mature and iron out all the kinks. However, in the UK we generally change our contracts every 12 months which mean if we buy the first gen as soon as they are available, then by the time the 2nd gen or 3rd gen dual layer are out, we could easily pick up a new phone with that technology in.
Although this is exciting news I am still wondering how they will compete with microSD cards which are increasing in capacity and are well over the 2Gb capacity at affordable prices. The good news is that the quality stored on the disc means it can also be inserted in to a player and put on to the big screen, but will it do well? I am not too sure. For some reason the whole idea sounds cool though of having Blu-ray discs on your phone.
Press Release
