Sony who are set to significantly expand their PC operation in Australia will next month start selling a portable computer that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive, adding PCs to the growing list of electronics that use NAND flash chips made by Samsung Electronics and Toshiba.

Sony who are set to significantly expand their PC operation in Australia will next month start selling a portable computer that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive, adding PCs to the growing list of electronics that use NAND flash chips made by Samsung Electronics and Toshiba.

The US $1,800 paperback-book sized computer has 16 gigabytes of storage and goes on sale in thefrom July 3 in Japan, Sony said in a statement today. The device has longer battery life, faster data retrieval and better shock resistance because it uses flash, which has no moving parts, rather than a hard disk drive, or HDD, Tokyo-based Sony said.

Sony and rivals such as Samsung are replacing hard disk drives in PCs with NAND, as prices for the chips fall and capacity increases, spurring demand.

Gartner Inc., a market researcher, on June 21 said increasing sales of mobile devices is likely to lead to a memory shortage in the fourth quarter of 2006.

“It would not be surprising to see mini-notebook PCs equipped with NAND as a standard rather than HDDs by 2009,” Hiroshi Yoshihara, a Tokyo-based analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. who has a “buy” rating on Toshiba, wrote in a June 15 report. Prices for NAND memory halve every year, he wrote.

Toshiba, the world’s second-largest maker of NAND flash memory after Samsung, gets more than half of its operating profit from the chips and in May said it plans to invest 1.02 trillion yen over three years in its semiconductor unit.

Market researcher ISuppli Corp. forecasts global sales of NAND flash to rise 29% to $13.8 billion in 2006, fueled by demand for mobile phones and portable music players such as Apple Computer’s iPod.

Apple may introduce a new iPod before the holiday shopping season, potentially exacerbating a shortage of NAND, Gartner said in its June 21 report. During last year’s holiday season, Apple sold a record 14 million iPods. Flash memory was used in 80% of all portable media devices last year.

Samsung on May 23 said it would sell a flash-only laptop that has 32-gigabytes of storage memory. The 2.3 million won ($2,400) computer is aimed at the Korean market, the South Korea-based company said.

Sony and Samsung have said their flash-based PCs are targeting users who want portable devices with more computing power than mobile phones and can be used to surf the Internet, e-mail, word-process and perform other functions on the move.