Durability: I’m in the flash memory camp, at least as far as portable players go. The reason is that despite all of Apple’s claims of anti-skipping and how you can go around jumping even with the iPod on you, the hard drive is not meant to take this kind of stress and in a lot of cases, it has gone kaput just from jogging. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of harshness the hard drive inside the N series is going to face considering the various activities we engage in during the day.

Battery Life: There is no denying the battery life advantage that flash based players have. A player as small as the Nano can hide away a battery to give you 14 hours battery life (which is nothing exceptional and should actually be much higher compared to what other manufacturers are offering) whereas a device fives times the volume (the regular iPod Photo) will give you a decent 15 hours of battery life. Sure you can argue that Nano has a smaller screen but as a comparison, iPod Photo has a 2-inch screen while the Nano supports a 1.5-inch version, which is a 40 percent reduction. In terms of size, though, it’s around 20 percent of the original iPod.

Cost: The only thing that is against the flash based players is the cost factor. It’s very expensive to make high capacity flash memory whereas micro-drives are comparatively cheaper and easier to manufacture. This is one of the main reasons why a lot of products these days are micro drive based (iPod being the best example but also Archos, Creative and iRiver products).

Form Factor: The biggest issue with micro drives is the form factor (apart from durability) but as technology advances, the drive size decreases and we are now down to 1-inch drives with 6GB of storage. Toshiba has launched a 0.85-inch micro drive, which will probably make most micro drive based players come close to the size of the iPod shuffle or maybe even the Nano, depending on how simple the design is. Then again, by that time the flash based drives would become smaller and probably have a much higher capacity than the present generation.

Personally, I think it makes a lot more sense for people to move on to flash based devices for the portable segment due to durability and as volumes rise, prices will come down with advancement capacities going up as well.

Micro drive and flash drive based players could take some bite of the flash market but they still have some catching up to do and a fair bit of work in convincing people about how "tossable" these products are.