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CompactFlash is, of course, no earthly to good many PDA users or to any phone users. SD cards are more common these days for the former merry band, and Mini SD and RS MMC seem to be where it’s at for phones – unless you are SonyEricsson and stuck in a MemoryStick rut.

SD card users can rejoice at the fact that Pretec has announced a 4GB SD card. Other formats are behind in the race. A quick look at UK online retailer Value Media reveals Mini SD cards at capacities up to 1GB and RS MMC at capacities up to just 512MB. That can’t last, and maybe we’ll see card formats like Mini SD get to 4GB within a year.

Having access to all that memory is great but only if you can afford it. The cheapest 1GB SD card at Value Media costs around £40 (inc VAT) and if you want to go SanDisk with its five year guarantee you’ll need to shell out £57 (inc VAT). I found a 2GB SD card at Picstop for £150, which is a lot of wonga, but rest assured, as capacities rise, prices will fall.

The LifeDrive’s memory is not flash. It comes courtesy of Hitachi and is a physical drive. The company has already announced a 6GB drive and will no doubt take this further.

So, we have a situation in which memory, both flash and physical, already exists in pretty large capacities, and looks likely to increase in capacity and decrease in price across a range of formats.

I think the internal/external memory debate is an interesting one, but it shouldn’t obscure the fact that increasing ‘micro-memory’ in general could enable companies like Palm to push at a door that has been closed for too long.

I mean to challenge laptops, traditionally built in the desktop PC mode, but potentially open to upscaling of the PDA format. We already have a number of PDAs with thumbpads built in, and plenty of external keyboards, such as those Lars looked at a couple of weeks ago here.

Why not integrate proper keyboards, increasing device size to mini-laptop proportions – A5 would be just about right. The benefits over traditional laptops could be plentiful and include: always on – no waiting for an OS to boot, data synchronisation with a network or PC over WiFi or physical docking, SIM slot for mobile data exchange, built in applications for producing documents, viewing attachments and so on, overall light weight. Keep the price down, and the integration with desktop and network computing solid, and I think you’ve got a winner.

Familiar? OK, I’m thinking about a Psion netBook-a-like. I have a netBook and it is used regularly at press conferences where it draws comments from other journalists as I touch-type away like ‘coo, that’s neat, where did you get it?’

I am not suggesting PDAs and smartphones will disappear. Memory expansion looks set to give both classes of device a real boost, allowing them to octopus out in a range of directions which the market can marvel at and choose between.

I am suggesting that Palm thinks seriously about taking its Mobile Manager category of which the LifeDrive is the first example, and reinventing the netBook. If it doesn’t do it, I want, and fully expect, someone else to.

Laptops look out – you’re on the hit-list – and it’s all thanks to developments in data storage.