Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The pricing I have available is in Australian dollars, and will clearly be lower in the US and Europe, but initial “recommended or estimated retail pricing” is always quickly undercut by retailers and street pricing.
Therefore it comes as no surprise to discover that the recommended retail price for the 16GB microSDHC card is AUD $141, while the ever-more-expensive M2 format retails for AUD $188.
SanDisk has chosen to start retail sales in Australia through the “Crazy John’s” mobile phone franchise store, now part owned by global telco Vodafone, and while SanDisk’s press release doesn’t specifically mention it, I personally don’t expect the distribution arrangement to remain exclusive for long given the already wide availability of SanDisk cards throughout the retail channel.
SanDisk is offering a 5 year limited warranty on both flavours of memory card, but how long will it be before a 32GB version comes to market?
Clearly we’re looking at a 2009 timeframe for that, the leap from 16GB to 32GB means packing as much again into the same space, but given the quick leap from 8GB to 16GB the question will be whether 32GB cards make their appearance in the first half, or the second half, of 2009.
And, now that we’re talking 16GB (and soon, 32GB) memory sizes, the pressure certainly is on Apple to reconsider its stance against including memory card expansion capabilities.
Sure, my raising it in this article is hardly going to cause Apple to release its 2009 iPhone with a microSDHC card slot, but it’s very clear that Apple is essentially the only hold-out in this expansion card stakes.
Apple obviously does this to ensure its ever larger memory capacity models are worth upgrading to for a variety of reasons, instead of simply buying memory from SanDisk and expanding capacity that way, and I guess as long as consumers are happy to keep on upgrading, Apple is happy to keep on doing things its way.
Still, we only need to look at the fact that Apple has lost its winning marketshare in the past to know that it could lose it again.
With a multitude of DRM-free MP3 stores now available (even in Australia), and with ever better software and hardware from competitors, including a memory expansion socket is something Apple may just have to do in the future – just as it has finally included voice recording in all its new iPod models – even if it cleverly requires users to buy a new Apple microphone/headset to activate it.
All of that said – I don’t think Apple will launch memory expansion any time soon, but with 16GB cards soon to be widely available and in 2009, 32GB cards, the lack of memory expansion looks ever stranger, while people may well end up asking themselves – what do we need Blu-Ray discs for, again?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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