"Digital" obesity

The tech-savvy generation is now under a threat of "digital" obesity, revealed a new study.

The tech-savvy generation is now under a threat of "digital" obesity, reveals a study conducted by Toshiba, as it has been reported that gadget lovers are loading and overloading their gadets with digital data equivalent to 10 trucks full of paper in "weight".

HT Image

Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), with more than 60 percent people keeping 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, thus becoming "digitally fat".

If digital hoarding habits continue on this scale, people could be carrying around a "digitally obese" 20 gigabytes by next year, warns California Institute of Technology Professor Roy Williams.

"As storage capabilities increase and the features and functionalities of mobile devices expand to support movie files and entire libraries of multi-media content, we will all become virtually obese," Martin Larsson, general manager of Toshiba's European storage device division, was quoted by the BBC, as saying..

The survey also reflects on the increasing trend for portable devices with built-in hard drives like music and media players from Apple, Creative Labs, Archos, iRiver and others and the trend is set to grow, according to analysts.

"Consumers are driving the move towards smaller devices that have greater functionality, and industry is trying to keep up.People are looking for more than just phone calls and text messages on the move, they want things like web browsing, e-mailing, music, photos and more," Larsson added.