Being able to plug high capacity microSD cards into smartphones has long been the best way to get large music collections, movies and huge number of photos onto most devices. As a result, the market for microSD cards has grown and grown, with power-users lapping up larger and larger capacity cards. SanDisk has now upped the ante after announcing its largest capacity card to date.
Coming only twelve months after launching its first 128GB card, SanDisk has now announced a massive 200GB microSD card which is larger than many SSDs that ship in some of the world’s most desirable notebook computers.
The timing of the announcement could have been better though. With SanDisk announcing its new microSD card at this year’s Mobile World Congress, Samsung was also at the event announcing its new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. What made the two phones so different to existing Samsung flagship handsets is the lack of memory expansion via the usual microSD card format. Historically, Samsung’s Galaxy S lineup has offered the ability to add storage capacity via memory cards, but with that no longer the case, SanDisk could see one of its biggest sources of income cut off.
With the iPhone not featuring any microSD card support and the newly announced HTC One M9 also sans memory card slot, it’s likely that most of 2015’s top selling handsets will not work with any microSD cards at all, leaving makers of such things in the lurch.
SanDisk’s new 200GB card is a thing of wonder though, and while some of the top smartphone makers seemingly starting to move away from additional memory options and towards larger built-in flash memory, we still expect there to be plenty of people buying microSD cards for years to come.
If you want one of SanDisk’s new cards, you’ll need a cool $400 to get one, though. The new microSD card will be available in Q2 of this year, so get those credit cards ready if you want to snap one up for yourself.
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