Japan's Showa Denko (SDK) has begun mass producing a phone-friendly 1.3in hard drive that can hold 40GB of data - the most capacious product of its kind, the company claimed.

Seagate, for one, has 1in drives out there, but they only run to 8GB. Samsung is working on 1.3in HDDs, but hasn't shipped one yet.

SDK didn't go into details about the drive's specifications, and there's nothing yet on the company's website. But SDK is keen to build its hard drive business, and clearly sees the kind of applications device makers have been using Flash memory for as a major opportunity for its products.

Will they choose the drive's high capacity, low cost approach over tried and tested but pricey Flash? We shall see. Samsung has, in the past, pitched handsets with built-in tiny hard drives, but they've never set the world alight. Nowadays, all phones with any significant quantity of integrated storage use Flash.

But that still leaves cameras, camcorders, video players and the like, all gadgets SDK would like to get it elfin HDD into. Will it succeed? We shall see.