Aside from being one of hip hop’s top producers, Just Blaze is also known around the industry as a serious gamer and all around gadget freak.

In the latest installment of Hip Hop Game’s 3-part interview series, Just talks about some of the gadgets that he’s looking forward to seeing this year–high capacity storage drives seem to be at the top of his list. Peep the full excerpt after the jump, along with a clip of Just and Pete Rock battling it out on the Xbox 360.

HHG: I know you’re big on gadgets. What are your favorite gadgets that are coming out in 2008?

JB: It’s kind of quiet right now. I know that Apple has something up their sleeve with the Mac Book Air (interview was conducted before the release/announcement of the Mac Book Air) and the speculation on what they’re going to do, if half of the speculation on what they’re gonna be is true then it’s going to be crazy. I think the new operating system that Google’s working on has the potential to be crazy. I don’t know how revolutionary it’s going to be off the bat or if it’s going to have the impact that the iPhone did, but I think that the fact that they’re making it open source, I think there’s a lot of good things that can come out of it aside from bringing them one step closer to taking over the world.

What else? That new Blackberry looks like the same thing. It doesn’t look groundbreaking. I think the biggest thing that’s probably going to come out this year is probably going to be the new iPhone. It may not be the best thing to come out this year but it’s going to be the biggest thing. The iPhone isn’t the best thing to come out in terms of features, but you can’t deny its features or user interface. You can’t deny its design. Apple is a design and lifestyle company first and foremost. Every feature that the iPhone has had, another phone has probably had that too for the most part. Some other phones have had forever, they just packaged it very well. I think the new iPhone, which they’ve already confirmed, will probably be the biggest thing unless there’s some surprises. It’s really too early in the year to call it.

I think the biggest thing that I’m excited about on the tech front is just the fact that hard drives and flash drives have gotten so cheap and the capacity is only getting bigger. In my laptop right now I have like 600 gigs of storage and I’m thinking about five years ago when having a 40 gig hard drive was a big deal and now I have 600 gigs of internal storage in my laptop. Late last year some geniuses at MIT figured out a way to give you a terabyte of storage on a flash device. And they may have it available to consumers this year. For people who might not understand what that means, you know how you have your pocket flash drive that might have 4-6 gig’s or maybe 8 gigs? Now you can get 1,000 gigs on your keychain. Put it this way – the top of the line iPod is 160 gigs. That holds what, 40,000 songs? Now picture that times almost 10. Obviously I don’t think anybody would ever need 400,000 songs in their pocket, but just the storage possibilities are going to be crazy.

Read the full interview here.
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