According to Reuters, Samsung has announced new advancement in flash memory technology. They expect to be shipping new chips by late next year that will hold 32GB of flash memory. The high end of such things in current use for iPod type devices now is more in the range of 4GB.

Flash memory is especially good for portable music or video players for multiple reasons. Basically, flash memory does not involve moving parts. For one thing, that makes them much less prone to skipping than a spinning hard drive while you're out jogging. Also, this means that they use much less power. For example, my humble 256MB flash player will routinely run 10 hours on one cheap AAA battery.

There's no word on initial pricing for these chips, but typically I would expect them to be cheaper and last longer than a hard drive. Getting up north of 30GB means the ability to hold a pretty substantial music and even video library, perhaps up to 680 hours of music according to Samsung.

That's a whole lot of memory to carry around on a convenient portable device. It'll sure be a heller bunch of pictures in a digital camera.