Flash cards becoming prominent in new generation mobiles

Stan Beer
Thursday, 17 February 2005 01:00

IT Industry - Development

This past holiday season, many consumers received mobile phones that are crammed with new, built-in features such as digital still cameras, video cameras, MP3 players and PDAs.

Many of these phones also include something that most consumers have never seen in a mobile phone before—slots for small-size flash memory storage cards.

Similar to the memory cards used in other consumer electronics devices such as digital cameras, the memory card that slides into that slot can greatly enhance the enjoyment and usability of a mobile phone and allow consumers to store a combination of digital photos, MP3 music, personal files, video games, personal video clips and other media-rich content.

The cards that go into those slots—including miniSD, SD, TransFlash, MultiMediaCard, RS-MMC™, Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick PRO Duo — are in effect the keys that unlock the full storage-intensive capabilities of these phones.

Flash cards for mobile phones are typically about the size of a postage stamp and range up to 2 gigabytes in capacity. Small-size flash cards from flash memory inventor SanDisk and other vendors have started to make their way onto the shelves of thousands of retailers including phone stores and consumer electronics outlets that sell feature-rich mobile phones.

Nelson Chan, SanDisk’s executive vice president and general manager, consumer and handset business, said, “We are seeing the emergence of a new generation of mobile phones that offer the capabilities of digital cameras, video camcorders and digital music players, all of which require substantially more flash storage.”

The market for mobile phones with card slots reflects high growth according to IDC, whose research shows that 87 million such phones were sold in 2004 and forecasts that 164 million will be sold worldwide in 2005. Industry sources indicate that more than 200 mobile phone models with card slots are expected to be introduced by the end of 2005.