High capacity memory cards
14 Nov 2008
After months of rumours, SanDisk has introduced the 16GB microSDHC and M2 memory cards.
Now, we are all used to the fact that most multimedia phones, nowadays ship with a memory card included. It started off with 256 MB and 512 MB cards. At present 1GB and 2GB capacities are the norm, with the option of upgrading to higher capacities. It is the upper limit of such an option, which has just been raised from 8GB to 16GB.
''What's the big deal?'' You might ask. Consider the implications now. With a 16GB card installed on your phone, you could store around 4,000 music tracks, assuming the average size of a track to be around 4MB at 128kbps.
If you're talking videos, depending on the format and the resolution, you could store about 16 hours of video footage!
Coming to photos, well, the sky is the limit - well almost! Depending on the resolution again, you could go from 3.2 megapixel, which is the de-facto standard on any multimedia phone worth its salt, up to 8 Megs on the Samsung INNOV8 i8510 and the soon-to-be-released Samsung Pixon M8800. I shall leave it to you to work out the actual number of pics that one could store on such a card.
On which phones would one use such a card? The Nokia N96 and the Samsung INNOV8 i8510 come to mind immediately. Both these phones have an inbuilt memory of 16GB. With this card installed, that becomes a staggering 32GB of storage!
