SanDisk Announces 4GB Memory Stick Micro M2 Cards

SanDisk announced the availability of a 4 GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. With a suggested retail price of $99.99, the new card is expected to be available worldwide this summer.

The SanDisk M2 card line is designed for use with mobile handsets that have an M2 slot or a Memory Stick PRO Duo slot. The 4GB card is compatible with Sony Ericsson's latest generation of multimedia mobile phones such as the Cyber-shot and Walkman series. Moreover, with the addition of a Memory Stick PRO Duo adapter, M2 cards are fully backwards compatible with all digital cameras and handheld game players such as the Sony PlayStation Portable that have a Memory Stick PRO Duo slot. Inside the new 4 GB card can fit approximately 1,000 MP3 songs (4-minute length songs at 128 kbps), or 9,600 high-resolution JPEG photos (shot with a 2-megapixel camera), or up to 20 hours of MPEG4 video (1-minute clips at 384kbps).

"Music, video, photos, games - these are the types of content driving the need for higher capacity cards such as the 4GB M2," said Jeff Kost, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Consumer Solutions division at SanDisk. "This trend is expected to grow as consumers embrace the mobile lifestyle and demand more storage-intensive features from a single mobile device."

The M2 format was co-developed by SanDisk and Sony Corporation to meet the growing demand for storage space, brought by the increasing number of compact, multimedia phones. The M2 card measures 15mm x 12.5mm x 1.2mm, making it the second smallest flash memory card in the world, behind the microSD format, developed by SanDisk.

In addition to the Memory Stick Micro M2 card, SanDisk offers a wide range of embedded and removable storage solutions for mobile devices, including iNAND and mDOC embedded flash drives and microSD, miniSD, MegaSIM, and microSDHC cards which have been recently announced in 6 and 8 GB versions.