SanDisk MicroSDHC 8GB

SanDisk's development of 6 GB and 8 GB microSDHC cards has reached the point where it has begun giving samples of them to smartphone makers for testing and evaluation. This puts SanDisk in the running to be the first company to widely offer microSD cards of this capacity. It has competition, though. Last month, Samsung announced -- but has not yet released -- its own 8 GB microSD card.

SanDisk has started shipping 8GB versions of its microSD and M2 cards, for the current generation of S60 3rd Edition and UIQ 3-powered smartphones, taking possible capacity of these devices to 8GB while maintaining the flexibility to swap cards or transfer data in this way. MyMemory, (e.g.) have these coming soon at £60 inc VAT). To some extent this negates an advantage of devices like the Nokia N95 8GB, but don't forget the advances in RAM and performance.

“With these new cards, any mobile phone with a compatible microSDHC slot will have just as much storage as the largest-capacity iPhone,” said Jeff Kost, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Consumer Solutions division at SanDisk. “What’s more, removable cards make it easy to share content you create with friends, ‘sideload’ files from a computer, and add more storage simply by purchasing more cards."

What's microSDHC?
As its name suggests, the microSD card format is the smallest in the SD family of removable memory cards. SDHC is the designation for any SD or SD-based card that is larger than 2 GB and adheres to the new SD 2.00 specification required for cards and hosts to support 4 GB to 32 GB capacities. The specification was developed by the SD Association, an industry standards board, which has also created three classes to define minimum sustained data transfer speed. SanDisk's upcoming microSDHC cards adhere to the SD Speed Class 4 Rating, which means they can, in theory, transfer data at up to 4 MB/sec.

8GB SanDisk Extreme III SDHC
With mobile devices becoming more capable by the minute, having appropriate on-board storage for multimedia and backups is more needed than ever. SanDisk's introduction 8-Gigabyte SanDisk Extreme III SDHC brings not only large capacity support for mobile devices, but also top-of-the-line performance.

This card can store more than 4,000 high-resolution pictures or up to 16 hours of MPEG-4 video. While this card is in the shape of regular SD cards, the SDHC designation means that it can only be used in devices that support the SDHC (secure digital high capacity) format. In some cases a mobile device would need just a software update to support SDHC; this, however, is up to the manufacturer of the device.

SanDisk 8 GB SDHC card will be packaged with a SanDisk MicroMate USB 2.0 Reader ($20) and is expected to ship in early November days for $180.