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DAVE - or digital audio video experience - is the answer to that issue, according to Seagate's Director of Global Consumer Electronics Marketing, Rob Pait.

The dynamics around this include the fact that a mobile phone is a very public device. Style rules, and adding weight and size in order to accommodate increased capacity just doesn't get much buy-in from the phone manufacturers.

Then, from a service aspect, the data-heavy mobile users are more likely to get their content from their computer rather than a mobile network operator, making it a niche audience and of little interest to Vodafone, O2 et al.

The third issue is the technology itself: spinning platters mean heavy power needs; not good for mobile phones which people expect to function for several days between charges.

This year's 3GSM raised the game on mobile services, with a raft of announcements and mobile content revenues now expected to hit £76bn by 2011. The European Commission expects the figure to reach £5.4bn by 2010. Such is the expected demand that the current frequencies available to mobile operators are likely to be insufficient until more bandwidth becomes available as the analogue TV frequencies are switched off.

Couple this with the rise of user-generated content and services, and ever more capable video- and camera-phones and you're looking at a lot of mobile content in the coming years.

But

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DAVE isn't about ticking these boxes with a disk drive per se. 'What we're talking about with DAVE is software,' said Pait. With DAVE this takes the form of a Storage Management Module.

'The software takes the instructions used for hard disk operation and pins them to the flash memory on the phone,' he explained. 'The hardware only spins up to burst content to the device, while instructions execute instantly.'

He said the reduction in motor use cuts power consumption by 85 per cent.

Seagate has already brokered chipset deals for DAVE on Marvell's PXA3xx series, ST Micro's Nomadik and Texas Instrument's OMAP platform, and is working with Quantum Italia to produce a personal media player.

The other software piece to DAVE is a Java applet to offer a file-system which operates seamlessly within the interface of a device, even when the data is stored remotely.

This is DAVE incarnate (pictured): a pocket-sized hard drive that sits in your pocket and stays there. Seagate is working with Orange UK's business services unit on such a device that is paired over a wireless connection to a mobile phone, secured via WEP. Businesses can be sure their data remains safe, even if the phone itself is lost.

Seagate has DAVE running in a variety of operating systems. Pait told us: 'We've already got lab compatibility with Symbian, Windows Mobile, J2ME and Brew.'

With Symbian, Seagate has signed up as a Platinum partner, giving it 'access to low-level platform resources,' said Pait.

He added that Nokia too, as a major stakeholder in the Symbian and Series 60 platforms, has plans to use DAVE in both the business and consumer markets.

'What we're building here is an ecosystem,' he said.

DAVE is expected to appear in commercial products using 1in drives this summer, said Pait, with capacities between 10GB and 20GB. He expects a 1.8in version with capacities up to 60GB to be available at a later date.

For more information, visit the Seagate website.