Coming Soon: 2TB Memory Cards

• Rob Jackson
• 15 years ago

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]