Samsung, one of Apple’s main iPod component suppliers, has announced that it will unveil two new parts designed for “mobile consumer devices” in January, coinciding with the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
First is the world’s first 1.3-inch hard drive, a size that is smaller than the 1.8” drives found in current iPod classic models; second is its 32 Gbit (4GB) NAND memory chip, which will not only increase the capacity of portable devices, but feature improvements to make it twice as fast as previous models.
It is unknown if the new 1.3-inch drive will appear in a future iPod model, however, as Samsung is one of Apple’s main NAND memory vendors, it is highly likely that the new 32 Gbit NAND modules will appear in higher-capacity, flash-based iPods, iPhones, and/or Macintosh computers sometime next year.