The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona usually covers the biggest innovations and advancements, but SanDisk's announcement today is all about the smallest yet most necessary piece of tech you need for your smartphone: storage.
Introducing the world's first 200 GB microSD card, Samsung promises the new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I Premium Edition will hold up to 20 hours of HD video and it will be able to transfer data at a blistering speed of 90 MB/s or 1,200 photos per minute. You should be able to hold entire seasons of Mad Men or Game of Thrones on one of these babies, but since it's premium the new card will cost a pricey $399.99 when it comes out in the second quarter.
"We continue to push technology boundaries to deliver record-breaking solutions that transform the way consumers use their mobile devices," said Dinesh Bahal, SanDisk's vice president of product marketing. "By focusing on achieving new capacity and speed milestones, we are able to deliver trusted mobile memory solutions that give consumers the freedom to never stop capturing, saving, or sharing - with the benefit of fast speeds to transfer it all quickly."
The new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I Premium Edition is the successor to last year's 128 GB card, which also broke storage records. The current leap to 200 GB is not as high as we would like since storage usually doubles from iteration to iteration, but although it falls short by about 56 GB the new card should remain an attractive option for the target audience of Android users.
However, SanDisk finds itself in a bit of a bind with this announcement since the Samsung Galaxy S6, the latest version of the best-selling Android phone, will lack an SD card slot, a move that could alienate both SanDisk's and Samsung's user base. HTC tried a similar tack with the HTC One M7 in 2013, but users wanted expandable memory so HTC brought it back in later models.
Along with the Ultra microSDXC UHS-I Premium Edition card, SanDisk also offers an updated version of its Memory Zone app, which monitors a phone's memory to let users know when the internal memory falls below a certain level. Once the internal memory goes past that level, the app will automatically transfer old photos and videos to the microSD card, freeing up more internal memory in the process. The app will be free to download from the Google Play store and is compatible with most Android devices.
Photo Credit: Uwe Hermann | Flickr
