Samsung Intros 8-GB Flash for Phones

By NewsFactor Network | March 12, 2007

Someday soon, many cell phones might store as many as 2,000 songs — or enough map data for a built-in GPS to steer you any place on the planet.

Those mobile dreams took a step closer to reality Sunday, when Samsung Electronics announced it had started shipping samples of its highest-density flash memory available on the open market — 8 GB. The previous highest density of Samsung’s moviNAND chips was 4 GB.

This high-density version of the company’s moviNAND line consists of four 50-nanometer, 16-gigabit flash modues, a high-speed MultiMediaCard (MMC) controller, and related firmware.

While the new memory is designed to be used in electronics devices, it also can be used in removable media cards for memory expansion. And it can transfer data at a rate of 52 MB/sec, twice the rate of the 4-GB chip.

Smaller, Cheaper, More Memory

Samsung noted that there are several advantages to the new high-density solution. It is as much as 20 percent smaller than other flash-based memory and it can reduce the need for an external memory card slot, making for smaller mobile devices.

In addition, by integrating the NAND flash with a standard MMC controller, mobile devices can be developed more quickly and at less cost than other solutions, Samsung said.

“You can never be too rich, too thin…or have too much memory,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. “GPS is certainly a growing category, as is video on the phone, and they both require storage. But the major news is for music phones.”

He noted that there were already phones with 4 GB of storage, although not that many and generally not in the U.S. — except for the as-yet-unlaunched iPhone, with 4 and 8 GB of capacity.

Battery Power

“The vast majority of music phones cannot play music right out of the box,” he…

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