WindowsForDevices has an interesting article today that shows the results from a recent ABI research study on high-end handset sales. It is interesting to note that the economy has not slowed down sale of higher-end mobile phones and the overall mobile market has been strong as well. This bodes well for flash memory vendors, especially for NOR flash vendors like Spansion and Numonyx since mobile handset industry has been a NOR stronghold (though lately NAND is making heavy inroads – call it the iPhone effect).

Gartner just announced their latest research on mobile phone sales. Here are some of the highlights

1. Q1 2008 worldwide sales – 294.3 Million
2. Growth in emerging markets [Asia/Pacific, Latin America] and slowdown in mature ones [US, Europe, Japan]
3. Nokia maintains market leadership with 39.1% market share
4. Motorola woes continue – share drops from 18.4% to 10.2%
5. LG and Samsung capitalize on Motorola’s challenges.

The entire press release is located here and is very informative. If you are in the mobile software/hardware business, I’d strongly recommend you check it out.

Welcome to the Datalight blog on “Data Matters”.   It’s amazing to see the increase in size and value of data in devices over 25 years that Datalight has been in business.   In the old days, well the 80’s, Datalight worked with Flight Data recorders that held data on 3.5 inch floppies using the FAT file system and  similar non-reliable foundations.  Today, device data requirements are growing at a tremendous pace. These requirements include reliability, performance, size and flexibility in media, bootability and system field-update requirements.

Image by mr brown via Flickr

On the consumer front, the spectrum moves from the inexpensive GO Phone, up to the Feature phones (with multimedia capabilities) toward the Smartphones that can assume the role of a MP3 Player, a movie Player or an office management system for the road warrior.

The more demanding embedded devices hold data that is much more valuable, sensitive, and mission critical.  These devices succeed or fail based on how they handle, store and deliver the data to the final data consumer.

There many “Good Enough” solutions that, well, aren’t really “Good Enough”!     Datalight is committed to Risk Free Device Data, and that’s what this Blog is all about.   If you require more than “Good Enough” for your device data, then keep reading.

Thanks for joining us!

Roy Sherrill
President