March 27 is a significant day for Korea's Samsung , as it holds its annual Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei today to announce the hottest imminent new products and technologies.
Foremost among those revealed this morning is a larger, faster solid-state drive (SSD) that uses flash memory to replace the spinning platters in conventional hard disks.
Gold in the market
After production begins in the second quarter of this year the most likely destination for the new drive is, of course, in high-end rugged laptop computers, which will come at a premium price, but there are other options.
Samsung says SSDs in the 8 to 16GB range will end up in sat-nav systems and camcorders, while flash drives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage will eventually be used in servers.
If anyone is wondering why the sudden upsurge in interest in SSDs, Samsung's footnote shines some light on the reason. The predicted value of the SSD market this year is an insignificant $200 million (£102 million), but that's set to rise to $6.8 billion (£3.5 billion) by 2010.