New Storage Technology: 500,000 Song iPod!!

TIMES ONLINE--Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce. In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company's research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time", and would last for decades.

At present the most capacious iPod - the 160GB iPod Classic - can store 40,000 songs.

IBM said the technology was still "exploratory" at this stage, but that it expected devices which used it to be on the market within ten years.