SanDisk developing 128 GB storage card for the mobiles

SanDisk, one of global leaders in flash storage cards is developing a 128 GB microSD card for mobiles that will be ready by 2011.

The Chief Operating Officer and one of the founders of US-based SanDisk Sanjay Mehrotra said “The tiny thumb-nail-size micro card will have storage capacity equal to today’s PCs. That is the power of digital flash memory which is faster, smaller and needs less power to operate.”

Flash card for mobile is now SanDisk’s fastest growing business that poured in $1.4 billion in the company’s total $3.9 billion revenue in 2007, said Mr Mehrotra. And there are good reasons for the focus. According to Gartner of the total 1.2 billion mobiles to be sold in the world in 2008, 700 million will have card slots for expandable memory.

This figure is expected to touch 950 million in 2010, as 80 per cent of world’s mobile phones will have card slots. SanDisk, which targets these handset owners as potential buyers of high capacity microSD cards, expects that nearly half the buyers will go for upgrades by replacing low capacity cards that come with the phone.

128 GB capacity will be able to hold 134 full-length movies, close to 20,000 high resolution photos and 16,000 songs, or the same in any other combinations.

While these developments are interesting, one can not help but feel that streaming media applications will limit the utility and need for large on-device storage. A simple example would be that it is simpler to watch any arbitrary music video from Youtube than store a large but always limited sample on one’s device (or even computer) itself.

Read more in this Deccan Herald article (via Dailymobile.se)