14 DAY TRIAL // SanDisk announced that it has completed development of new 6 and 8 GB microSD High Capacity (microSDHC) flash memory cards for mobile phones. Sandisk is currently sampling the products to major phone manufacturers and mobile network operators for testing and evaluation, the release of the cards being planned for later this year.
"With these new cards, any mobile phone with a compatible microSDHC slot will have just as much storage as the largest-capacity iPhone," said Jeff Kost, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Consumer Solutions division at SanDisk. "What's more, removable cards make it easy to share content you create with friends, 'sideload' files from a computer, and add more storage simply by purchasing more cards. By offering capacities of 6GB and 8GB, SanDisk is poised to enable people to enjoy more photos, more map data for navigation, more videos, more games and more music, wherever they go, on any phone with a compatible microSDHC slot." And in case someone is wondering how much data can fit on a 8 GB card, the figures are approximately as follows: 2000 MP3 songs (4 minute songs at 128 kbps), or more than 5,000 high-resolution pictures (with an average file size of 1.5 megabytes), or up to 5 hours of high-quality MPEG 4 video (at 30 frames per second and 640x480 resolution).
SDHC is the designation for any SD or SD-based card that is larger than 2GB and adheres to the new SD 2.00 specification required for cards to support 4GB to 32GB capacities. The specification was developed by the SD Association, which has also created three classes to define minimum sustained data transfer speed. The new microSDHC cards from SanDisk adhere to the SD Speed Class 4 Rating (the middle class), meaning that the minimum write speed on an empty card should be of 4 MB/s.
In addition to microSDHC, SanDisk offers a broad range of both embedded and removable storage solutions for mobile devices. Product lines include iNAND and mDOC embedded flash drives and microSD, miniSD, Memory Stick Micro M2 and MegaSIM cards.