By 
You read that right. The SD Assocation has just announced a new standard that will allow mobile phones, cameras and camcorders to store 2 TERABYTES of data on a flash card the size of your current MicroSD card. And speaking of which, they’ll be compatible with current SD 2.0 drives to ensure a smooth transition. Considering 16GB and 32GB MicroSD cards in mobiles are considered relatively large today… the increase is astounding.
The new specification is called SDXC and products with the new flash memory won’t likely reach the market until 2010 CES, at which point we’ll all jump for joy. The organization’s press release explains that you could store 100 HD movies, 60 Hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-mode photos on such a card. Read/write speeds you ask? Currently 104 megabytes per second and hopefully, by launch, will reach 300 megabytes per second.
The implications on consumers is nothing short of HUGE! Gone will be the days of worrying which music to put on your phone, which games to put on, which pictures to put on or which ANYTHING to put on. Your mobile phone will be able to store it ALL on a little card the size of a fingernail. This development will work WONDERS for mobile convergence.
As your mobile phone adds elements such as digital cameras, digital video recording, GPS, music playback, video playback, etc… we encounter a couple new problems:
- The quality of each is compromised to account for the complete package
- There is no way to store all of these devices’ “goodies” on one phone
The latter of these problems, as we now know, is close to being solved. A 2TB SDXC card could easily hold all of the pictures on your current digital camera and all of the music on your iPod with PLENTY of room to spare. And with that spare room why not save games, movies, documents and everything else that is on… oh… I don’t know… your home computer?
We’re getting to the point where you’ll know longer be carrying your phone around with you… you’ll be carrying your life. When you put it like that it raises some concerns, does it not? What if it gets stolen? What if you lose it? The issues and problems will be solved as they come, but the options that this options up for consumers is simply exciting.
And unfortunately, we’ll probably STILL be calling these all-in-one multimedia devices “cell phones” rather than something much more appropriate.
[Via SD Association]
you are still limited by the device, NO!
What if your phone can only read 8GB as in the case with G1?
the good news will be installing windows on the SD card and boot to USB… )
Walking operating system with all the bells and whistles
I’m sure this is just mainly a filesystem change. Currently with fat32 SD cards theoretically top out around 128GB if I remember correctly, just like old fat16 SD cards topped out at 2GB (4GB with “not-to-spec” 64-byte block size). I’m sure the biggest aspect of the change will be a switch to NTFS (or, unlikely, a more open filesystem like ext3).
I would much rather see the open-spec MMC standard implement these changes ahead of the game and take domination of the memory card away from the royalty-hungry association that controls the rights to SD.
If there actually existed 2TB-MicroSD cards then there would be no need for spinning harddrives in any PC anymore. This would be far HUGEr than implied here. So the presentation of a standard like this is nice, but don’t get your hopes up for a 2TB memory card anytime soon I think..
the sdxc spec is “up to 2 TB”. This is “spec” not physical product. It could take years past 2010 before you actually see a 2TB card in sdxc package.
It’s great that spinning media is starting to fade away but I’m pretty sure we’ll find a way to fill a 2TB storage unit and want for more.
@jo : G1 is confirmed to work with 16GB microSD card.
That’s nice and all to think of 2TB on your phone… but I just don’t think it’s useful at this point. We may get to that point quickly; I’m sure some of the older users here remember when one GB was beyond anything they thought they would ever use. All I really want right now is about 80GB for my G1 tops. After that, I just won’t use any extra space.
With memory of this and speed large web companies can save millions a year on their electric bill. Software will stop using multiple dual layer DVD’s. Libraries will be complete obsolete as an entire countries text could fit into just a few of these.
I agree with the above statements, “Your phone will be your life”. 10 years ago you would pull out a wallet to show pictures of your kids to strangers while getting acquainted. 5 years ago you’d just show a picture on your phone. Last year, a youtube video or myspace page using your touch screen device.
Imagine where this will go once you’re not limited by the phones capabilities to access the information. Especially if the phone world finally overlapped with the mini laptop world and based all their code on 64 bit processors.
With recent battery technology and power efficiency, you could easily run a phone like that for 8-12 hours. (Which is more than i can say than my Palm Centro.)
I see cellphone video cameras always on to record everything you do in life.
I also see carry all the info on the internet around with you and rarely actually needing to directly consult it.
in fact this thing could perhaps record so much of your life and circumstances as well as your responses it could perhaps create a download of your mind profile alleviating the need to do a neuron by neuron scan to recreate your brain in your clone.
on top of all that it might hold all the porn anyone could need. nah scracth that.. nothing could do that. that’s just silly.
A 2TB SD card will be the death knell for streaming music services and standalone music players.
Too bad that you have to store apps on internal memory (jailbraking aside)
sreaming musik services gone dominate the legal musik market, you dont need to have all the worlds musik in youre hard drive.
appel whont ever need that much memory capicity untill they remove there botel neck itunes.
removing spinging hardrive will be nice. the new media players will have slim look and never need to switch youre musik on youre mp3 and have you’re film colection on xvid.
HI THERE ONE DAY WE WILL HAVE BLACK HOLE MEMORY AND RAM WITH INFINITY OF DATA.
“When you put it like that it raises some concerns, does it not? What if it gets stolen? What if you lose it?”
Maybe someday, someone will invent encryption!!!!
alert(‘lol’)
Jo :
“What if your phone can only read 8GB as in the case with G1?”
My own G1 Dev phone (original!) has always been able to use 16Gb .. I recently rooted it , and would love to find a bigger Micro SD for it .. but that’s an ‘unknown’ as of now 6/2010
@tjktkj, http://www.amazon.com/Micro-Secure-Digital-Adaptor-2IN1-32G-R/dp/tech-data/B004AM6SRS