A Flash in the iPod

With its line of iPods, Apple has dominated the digital music player business, accounting for more than 73% of the units shipped in the U.S. in the first half of the year, according to the NPD Group, an industry research firm.

Though its initial players were all based on hard drives, the company jumped into the flash-based market earlier this year with its introduction of the iPod shuffle.

Because flash memory itself is typically smaller and lighter than hard drives, flash-based players typically are smaller than their hard-drive-based rivals.

But flash-based players have had their drawbacks. While Apple's shuffle line immediately became the top-selling, flash-based music player, the product drew criticism for its lack of a screen.

In general, flash-based players have a fraction of the storage space available on hard-drive-based players. Apple's top-end shuffle, for instance, holds just 1GB of data, while its low-end, hard-drive player is the 4GB iPod mini.

A flash-based mini would seemingly address both of those criticisms -- offering the storage space available in a hard-drive based player and a screen to boot -- while allowing Apple to package it in a light-weight device.

Other analysts recently predicted that Apple will likely introduce a slew of new products, including a new iPod, as soon as next month.

Market Moving

To produce the new 4GB flash-based iPod, Apple has contracted to buy as much as 40% of Samsung's output of NAND flash memory in the second half of this year, according to Kim. That's a potentially huge portion of global NAND output, the analyst said, as Samsung alone accounted for 55% of the sales of NAND memory in the second quarter.

NAND is one of two main flavors of flash memory, NOR being the other. NAND is typically used in digital music players because it's often less expensive than NOR, and it's able to write data more quickly.