With the iPhone already the largest application for NAND-type flash memory, the device's sales growth and high memory usage may cause some periods of undersupply for 2010, according to iSuppli.
"An average of 35.2GB of NAND will be used in each iPhone sold in 2010, iSuppli estimates," said Michael Yang, senior analyst for memory and storage at the research firm. "Furthermore, iPhone shipments are set to rise to 33 million in 2010, up 31.5% from 25.1 million in 2009."
Partly owing to demand driven by the iPhone and competitive products, global NAND flash revenues will rise to US$18.1 billion in 2010, up 34% from US$13.5 billion in 2009, according to a preliminary forecast from iSuppli. This compares to a 14.8% increase in 2009.
"The success of the iPhone in the smartphone category has spurred the launch of a series of competitive mobile phones," Yang said. "These include the Motorola Droid, HTC Android Iris, Palm Pre and Google Nexus One. Although these phones may choose a different solution for storage memory, such as a microSD card, they will still aim to match the iPhone spec for spec in terms of memory capacity. This bodes well for NAND flash demand."
iSuppli forecast shipments of mobile handsets with embedded NAND flash will grow to 732 million units in 2010, up 13.8% from 643 million in 2009. This compares to marginal growth of 1.6% in 2008.
While e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle may follow a similar growth path as Apple's iPods, they do not use nearly as much NAND flash memory, iSuppli indicated. Readers contain a mere 512MB to 2GB of embedded NAND included in each device. And although density will no doubt grow in the coming years as wireless Internet enables more features and functionality, NAND usage will remain low in 2010, iSuppli predicts.
As to tablet PCs with 32GB to 64GB of storage, the segment remains unclear if volumes will reach the projections of hopeful manufacturers, according to iSuppli. The introduction of Apple's iPad, though, might boost the market, and if the adoption rate for the iPad approximates that of the iPod and iPhone it could be a serious market-changing segment for NAND vendors, iSuppli noted.