Although flash costs are dropping, this likely won't position it as a genuine competitor with hard drives. "Hard disks will develop in the same way that flash is developing," says Sanggoo Kang, Jet-Audio's Director of Business Development. "In my opinion, hard drives will become more shock-absorbent, small, lighter, and so forth, which would make it hard for flash to ever compete."

Storage capacity. Closely related to storage type is its capacity. In all areas of digital devices, memory and storage have been increasing over the years, but is there a practical upper limit where players are concerned?

Referring to the flash market, Jesse Fernandez, of PoGo! Products, says, "I see 512MB to 1GB becoming the norm as costs go down."

This isn't to suggest that flash capacities can't go higher. Kang points out that current flash technology can handle 8GB of storage but concedes that it may take a long time before this becomes commercially viable.

"What you've seen develop over the last year are three distinct areas for portable players," says Dan Torres, vice president of Product Marketing for Rio. "You have flash players up to 512MB, mini hard-disk players from 1.5GB to 5GB, and the high-end players are peaking at 20GB. For music devices, this seems to be all the consumer wants at this point. If video ever takes off, I think you'll see the high-end players go well in excess of 20GB."

Video? Sure. Hard drives don't care what they store. Even now we find units that play music, photo, and video files. Take SmartDisk's FlashTrax (www.smartdisk.com), which, despite the implication of its name, uses hard drives up to 80GB. Of course, size becomes a factor here; a player has to be big enough to incorporate a screen worth looking at.

Player size. The smallest digital music players available are the size of flattened butane lighters. Have players shrunk about as far as they're going to?

"It looks that way for now," PoGo's Fernandez says, "but that's hard to tell as technology continues to advance."

Francis Choi, technical marketing manager for JetAudio, says, "I believe there is room for players to progressively become smaller. We may even have a player that's the size of a button on your shirt. One Japanese cell phone manufacturer developed a cell phone that can be imbedded in our arms. Hi-tech and bio-tech combined can create wonders."

Miniaturization for its own sake is pointless and comes with a downside that Rio's Torres points out: "The smaller the player gets, the harder it is to use."

"I don't think we're talking nanotechnology here, but you can expect form factors to become more flexible, and possibly more organic," iRiver's Sasse says. "We do not believe in making players small just for the sake of having small devices, but producing the products that consumers desire, and if that means making them smaller, there is still a lot of room for reduction."

Connectivity. The Apple/Motorola plan for Bluetooth transfers notwithstanding, the manufacturer reps agree that, for the near future, we'll see a solidification of the high-speed USB 2.0 as the standard for connecting players to PCs.

Sasse breaks it down this way: "Ubiquity and speed are the determining factors. Most consumers don't buy a PC based on USB or FireWire ports. They use what's there. However, USB 2.0 has a lot going for it, including backward compatibility with USB 1.1. USB 2.0 does not require that customers abandon USB 1.1 devices that don't need the bandwidth of a fast port. The flexibility of a single-port solution is very compelling."

And what about FireWire? Although it was the first plug-and-play high-speed interface, FireWire jacks still come standard only on Macs. Even iPods, which initially used only FireWire for file transfer and battery charging, now also permit USB 2.0 connectivity. So although FireWire will remain strong with iPods, don't look for it on too many other players, if any.

DRM (digital rights management) and file support. This area has the most potential for disagreement, bewilderment, and even outright blunders.

As online retailers vie for iTunes' success, each implementing copy protection, and as more manufacturers develop proprietary compression formats, there will be incompatibilities. The iPod doesn't play WMA files, and Sony incorporated WMA and MP3 support only after the W-HD1 Network Walkman had been on the market. The eventual emergence of pocket-sized audio/video players can only generate even more format wars.

Rio's Torres says, "We support a range of formats and feel this is the way to alleviate customer confusion and frustration."

"The online music services seem to be overwhelmingly adopting DRM, so we'll continue to support DRM while playing the other major formats, as well," Sasse says. "We're rising above the debate on proprietary formats. We'll let the market decide. In the meantime, we'll support a wide range of formats and our players are firmware upgradeable to allow for support of emerging formats."

JetAudio's Kang says, "Unrestrictive access should be a default feature on portable media, in my personal opinion. However, if there was an effective universal DRM that consumers could easily use, manufacturers would have to support it." Without that, though, customer demand will be the ultimate determining factor, and "eventually many file types will be extinguished."

Keep Listening

We suspect that the next broad development will be players with wireless networking capabilities. This is something JetAudio is working on, on the path to the company's ultimate goal "to develop a gadget that will play all multimedia formats available, regardless of whether they're audio or video," Choi says.

At the same time, we'll continue to see players that fill more specialized needs. Just as we went to press, iRiver, in partnership with H20 Audio, announced the H2O Audio SV i700, the world's first waterproof MP3 player and headphones, suitable for water sports or just lounging in a hot tub.

So keep an ear to the ground. You never know what you might hear.

by Brian Hodge