Deep-pocketed mobile phone owners will soon be able to carry more photos, music and videos on their devices with SanDisk's 32 GB MicroSD card.
The card will be available on SanDisk's Web site on March 23, for a suggested retail price of $200. Keep in mind, though, that retailers will likely mark the price down from the list price when they get the card in April. Amazon, for instance, is selling SanDisk's 16 GB MicroSD card for $36.33 -- one third of the list price. The 32 GB cards come with a 5-year warranty.
This will be the first 32 GB MicroSD card to ship, edging out Samsung, which said in January that mass production of its own cards would begin the following month. To give a sense of the storage capacity, SanDisk says the card can hold enough music for 35 round-trips between San Francisco and New York (in other words, about 200 hours of music). SanDisc also makes MicroSD cards in sizes of 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB.
With Android phones rising in popularity, and Symbian-based Nokia phones still leading the global market, bigger SD cards are certainly welcome. While some smartphone makers, such as Apple, Palm and soon Microsoft with Windows Phone 7 Series, opt for internal storage, presumably to keep their phones' designs smooth and unbroken, surely some users prefer the flexibility of removable cards.
Still, the less the user needs to break up their media library, the better. Finally, smartphone users who rely on external storage finally have a rival to the iPhone 3GS's 32 GB of internal capacity. And as with any advancement in memory, this will mean lower prices for lower-capacity cards, and possibly bigger cards packed into new phones.
