Over the past few years smartphone and tablet makers have ramped up the amount of storage used in their top-of-the-line smartphones. It’s not uncommon to find phones that offer 32GB of storage, and a few models even come with 64GB.
But software developers have also been ramping up the size of their apps. Some games can eat up 3GB of storage or more in one fell swoop.
So Samsung is preparing for the next stage in the storage wars by building a new 128GB flash storage chip for future smartphones.
The new eMMC (embeded multimedia card) will be able to hold 15 full-length HD movies at 8GB each, with 8GB left over for the operating system and apps.
In other words, you might not need a microSD card… unless apps continue getting even bigger, or you decide to store some 4K resolution videos on your phone for some reason.
Samsung says the new chips offer read speeds up to 140 MB/s and write speeds up to 50MB/s. That’s not as fast as a good SSD designed for laptop or desktop computers, but it’s five times faster than a Class 10 SDHC card.
via Gizmodo
Glad to hear this. The whole cloud storage thing isn’t for everyone. Of course, I’d still like to have an SD slot just in case. I’ll take that extra 1mm or so thickness.
This would go a long way towards making the lack of microSD slots on many new devices a moot point. Still, 128 GB devices are going to be EXPENSIVE, but should at least make 32 and 64 GB devices more commonplace; they’re both still pretty rare and pricey.
My preference is still for a combination of internal and external storage; device would sell for less and allow the user to decide how much or how little extra space they wanted. My SGS2X has 48 GB total (16 GB internal, 32 GB microSD).