11.14.2006

Cell Phone Memory is BIG Business

Article Presented by:
Tim Thurlow


As cell phone technology has advanced recently and at a blistering pace the need for larger memory storage has become apparent to all cell phone manufacturers.

Most people now use their phones not for just for making calls but for things like storing music, video clips and indeed whole movies. All of these things share one thing in common the need for larger memory. When you consider the average cell phone comes with around 32MB of internal memory and the average MP3 song uses around 6MB of memory it soon becomes apparent that people are going to demand larger storage, and indeed that's what they have done. Whether or not cell phone manufacturers have deliberately installed their phones with tiny memory to make consumers purchase new cards is a debatable subject but one thing is for sure cell phone memory is now BIG business!

Around 18 months ago if a cell phone needed extra storage the most popular format was the standard SD card, but since that time the market has seen the introduction of five new memory card formats which are all now widely used by the leading manufacturers.

Firstly Sony introduced the Memory Stick Pro Duo cards for use in all of their compact devices including most Sony Ericsson cell phones, but as the phones have got smaller so has the need for reduced size memory cards which has led recently to the introduction of the Memory Stick Micro M2. These new memory cards are used in all of the latest Sony Ericsson phones and are no bigger than your little fingernail which is quite impressive when you consider that they can store up to 1GB of information.

For all other manufacturers the Mini-SD card was introduced which is around half the size of a standard SD card. This format has proved to be highly popular and if you've bought a new cell phone in the last year there's a good chance that it has used Mini-SD as it's main storage format. Next and used particularly by Nokia is the MMC Mobile card which was introduced just over a year ago, these cards are similar in appearance to the Mini-SD cards and are becoming ever more popular.

Similarly to Sony Ericsson and due to market influences all other major manufacturers have realised the need to reduce the size of their handsets and in turn the size of their memory storage. This has led to the introduction of the Micro-SD card. Measuring just 10mm x 15mm this is the smallest memory card format in todays marketplace. The Micro-SD card (also called Transflash) is rapidly becoming the memory card of choice for todays leading cell phone manufacturers. The highest capacity available for the Micro-SD cards now is an amazing 2GB which was introduced as recently as September 06. The introduction of all of these new formats has made the digital memory card market one of the fastest growing areas in todays marketplace. All of the major digital memory manufacturers have got on the band wagon with the major players like Kingston and Sandisk supplying the whole product range of the new formats. Sandisk have actually just released their version of the Sony Micro M2 card. Sandisk are the only brand that Sony has allowed to manufacturer their new format apart from Sony themselves.

In summary it looks like this market is going to continue to grow and grow, that's as long as cell phones continue to demand higher memory storage and with the continued introduction of memory sapping functions I think that's a pretty safe bet.


About the Author:
Tim Thurlow is the owner and webmaster of Low Price Memory one of the UK's leading memory cards suppliers. You can visit their website at http://www.lowpricememory.co.uk