World’s Biggest: 8Gb MicroSD HC card from Samsung

If your new smartphone has a MicroSD HC slot, Samsung’s new 8Gb card will be the one you want – when the price comes down. While few phones sport a MicroSD HC slot today, plenty of tomorrow’s phones will, and you’ll want the extra memory!

Samsung’s new MicroSD HC card is around the size of the fingernail on your little pinkie, yet stores a whopping 8Gb of data with the capacity to store 2000 mp3s, 4000 digital photos or around 5 DVD-quality movies.

That gives it the same capacity as you’ll find in an 8Gb iPod nano or iPhone, and shows why adding memory sockets to phones or mp3 players is a good idea. Although no price was issued for the new card, it’s likely to be quite expensive as all new technologies often are, before prices come down and talk of a 16Gb card being launched soon approaches.

The SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) standard is an improvement over the original SD standard which only allowed for memory cards to reach a maximum capacity of 2Gb. SDHC cards range from 4Gb in size all the way up to 32Gb, although 16Gb and 32Gb sized MicroSDHC cards will only be found in the lab at this stage, as they figure out how to shrink memory modules even further so more memory can be packed into the MicroSD card’s tiny dimensions.

And because SDHC is a different standard to SD, you can’t use SDHC cards in the now-older SD slots. Some devices have started coming out with SDHC slots, such as Canon’s latest batch of digital cameras, but plenty of other devices are waiting for an upgrade, including just about any phone out there sporting a MicroSD card slot.

According to Samsung, “With a read speed of 16 Megabytes (MBs) per second and a write speed of 6MB/s, Samsung’s 8GB microSD card well exceeds the Speed Class 4 SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) standard which requires a data write speed of 4MB/s. This is also much faster than the SD Speed Class 2 designation carried by most competing microSD cards currently on the market”.

Given that every new smartphone from now onwards is likely to sport a MicroSD HC compatible socket, except those from Sony Ericsson which use Sony’s own M2 ‘Memory Stick’ derived format, and given that 2Gb MicroSD cards are common and cheap nowadays, the MicroSD HC format is about to take off in a big way.

Samsung quotes market research firm Dataquest predicting that “the memory card market as a whole will average 10 percent annual growth between 2006 and 2010, while demand for high density 8GB cards will grow an average of 2.6 times per year over the same period. By 2010, the 8GB memory card will be the market mainstream in terms of units sold”.

Well, it all depends on the speed with which they release 16Gb and 32Gb MicroSD HC cards, but if the acceleration continues as it has, 8Gb cards will become common a lot sooner than 2010, with 32Gb cards likely to be common in that timeframe, and a MicroSD Super High Capacity likely to have been invented to allow these theoretical MicroSD SHC cards to store 100Gb or more.

With all the user-generated content floating around the web, much of which is already created on smartphones (think of all those ‘concert’ video clips that users with smartphones are creating these days, even though most concert venues ‘prohibit’ the use of cameras and other recording equipment), the need for storage, higher definition video, more music and other digital data is only going to increase at an ever faster rate.

Samsung’s 8Gb MicroSD HC card is a fantastic new development which means competitors such as SanDisk, Lexar, Kingston and all the rest will soon catch up, making these cards more affordable and further spurring development towards 16Gb, 32Gb and even larger cards in the future.

After all, as I’ve said in the past, space IS the final frontier. You’d better believe that memory and storage companies know this and are doing everything they can to give us more than we know what to do with but manage to fill up with all kinds of digital ‘stuff’ anyway!


Source : www.itwire.com.au

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