Portable harddrive devices: what's the near future

[sacrophyte]

I have been thinking about buying a harddrive-based mp3 player to store digital pictures (as opposed to buying lots of flash cards for a long trip), but wondering if I should wait for a while. Unfortunately, I have a Sony camera (bad because of its propietary flash media - not very standard/compatible with other products), and would like to download directly into a portable storage device. I think I can do that with a Sony USB flash-card reader into any USB port on a portable device, but have not tried it yet. Is that the best way to go? Is it worth it to plunk down a couple hundred for a sizeable (20GB) mp3 player? What is on the horizon for these type of products?
P.S. Where does one look to 'see' the technology horizon, anyway?

 

[sacrophyte]

After searching through dpreview.com, I came across nixvue and mindstor. Anyone have any opinions of those?

wisdom: knowledge tied with action