Beware of this cheap A-Data 16GB SDHC class 6 card, I just bought two and they aren’t recognized by the Archos while they seem to work fine in my Sanyo HD1000 camcorder and other SDHC devices including SDHC card reader on the PC. You can read about SDHC card compatibillity in this thread: http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?p=81448#81448

Amazon.com US has 16GB A-Data cards for $79, which is kind of nice to think about. Prices for those SD cards seems to go down about half every 18 months or something like that.

So for $250-279 you get the 605 WiFi 4GB with a 16GB SD card, thus 20GB of storage. And possibillity that you will buy more SD cards in the next couple of years that have 32GB each, and for a price of less than $1 per GB soon on the SD cards.

I think Archos is preparing the flash based solution nicely for when Archos will be able to include HSDPA in the devices. Then you could basically stream all the audio and video content directly from the Internet from everywhere, requiring that the battery consumption for HSDPA audio and video streaming is tested to be usable by the time that the Archos HSDPA devices will be released.

For sure there should always be the nice big fat hard drive Archos model options. Also considering that in theory Archos could put as much as 500GB in a PMP using one of those recent 500GB 2.5″ hard drives by Toshiba, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Seagate. 1.8″ and 2.5″ hard drives will certainly always be able to provide their advantage in capacity and cost per GB compared to flash based memory, as when there are flash innovations, we also see very rapid improvements in hard drive capacities and prices. So expect also that hard drives will double in capacity every 18 months. The comparison in price/GB and capacity/inch for hard drives and flash memory could stay the same for a while. So for uses where you can use a lot of local storage, high capacity and low price per GB of hard drives will continue to make sence, though with ubiquituous broadband connectivity, local storage on the pocket device itself might be less necessary.

Here in Denmark, http://3.dk just started providing unlimited bandwidth for 299kr (40€ = $60) per month, before that 7,2mbit/s download and 384kbit/s upload connection was limited by a 10GB per month bandwidth limit. Now they say that the limit is gone, so one can basically leech as much as one wants on the HSDPA network for a fixed fee now here in Copenhagen.

With Femtocells and stuff like that, HSDPA providers could quickly add more bandwidth to their HSDPA network to provide even more bandwidth to everyone.