Would you like a hard drive with that?

The humble hard drive used to be the least interesting part of your computer, only getting attention when it was (a) full or (b) broken. Then it curled up inside the iPod and got sex appeal by association. Now hard drives are everywhere. For example:

• Samsung has announced the SGH-i300, a mobile phone with a 3Gb hard drive for storing music and photographs.

• Satnav specialist TomTom has announced the TomTom Go 700, a portable car navigation system with a 2.5Gb hard drive for storing maps.

• JVC is now selling three Everio camcorders that use 4Gb removable microdrives instead of tape.

• Telewest will offer a set-top box with a 160Gb hard drive later this year. It joins a host of other hard-disk recorders from the likes of Sky, Pace, Humax and Panasonic.

Everybody and their dog has launched a hard-drive-based MP3 player, image viewer and/or video player. Every hard disk manufacturer is selling an external model in a stylish case. If you haven't got a spinning data disk about your person, you can't call yourself a geek. Flash memory is so last year.

What's next? We'd like a multimedia PDA with a built-in hard drive. -ML