Room for one more track? According to researchers from Glasgow University, you’ll have plenty of room soon. Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala have completed research that means a single square inch of memory could contain as much as 500,000 GB, instead of the current limit of approximately 3.3GB.
That should have ISPs in a bit of a panick, following news that they want the BBC to pay more because of the popularity of the BBC iPlayer. Imagine the number of downloads that you would need to manage in order to fill an iPod Nano that can hold over 100,000 times more songs.
The change in technology could mean even smaller MP3 players and other portable devices although it may not be worth getting your hopes up just yet. While the technology has been proven, Professor Lee Cronin admits that they have “yet to solve the fabrication and addressing problems.”
If a 5GB MP3 player holds around 2,500 songs, this could mean the advance of an MP3 player that would house an astonishing 250 million tracks. That’s an awful lot of Cliff Richard in anyone’s book.
