A report from Prudential Equity Group indicates Apple would be smart to shift from HHD to flash memory for the larger iPods. Although the cost-per-gigabyte would be more, the user experience and product logevity would improve. Currently only about 3.5 hours of juice are available for iPods when running video you don’t want to lose power at the climax.

Switching to flash memory reduces power consumption and extends video play to 5.5 hours, as significant improvement. With current iPod sizes at 30GB and 80GB and the largest flash memory (at a decent price for CE products) at 32GBs it’s a fairly easy decision to make.  By the time all solid flash memory devices are ready to hit the market we are looking at a high-end capacity range of 120GBs.

Source:  Apple Insider