Looking to continue what's turning out to be an annual tradition of driving a leadership stake into the ground at the Consumer Electronics Show, SanDisk today announced that it has managed to squeeze 12 Gbytes onto a microSD card. The announcement comes at a time when SanDisk's competitors are just bringing 4-Gbyte cards to the market.

Already, SanDisk sells an 8-Gbyte microSD card for $129.99. SanDisk also announced its Titanium USB drive (and claims it to be nearly indestructible). Between its ability to take a good deal of punishment and the way SanDisk lets users tie it directly to an online storage service, the 4-Gbyte thumb drive is designed as a low-friction, highly fault-tolerant solution for backing up important data from a hard drive (or network).

At last year's CES, SanDisk (a company known for its leadership in the flash memory category) showed off a 2-Gbyte microSD card, and that was rather dramatic given how I had never seen 2 Gbytes squished into that tiny of a space before (microSD cards can't even cover your fingertip). So, to see the company showing off 12 Gbytes in the same form factor a year later is, well, shocking.

Shown in the video above is SanDisk's senior director of marketing Michael Romero, who talks about what the company is calling a "technology demonstration" and shows the card functioning in the microSD card slot of a Nokia N95 multimedia smartphone. Seeing such a high-capacity microSD card really makes you wonder why Apple didn't include a microSD card slot in its iPhones and iTouches. After all, with a card like this one from SanDisk, iPhone owners could have more than doubled their existing storage space.

According to Romero, storage expansion isn't the only use that SanDisk envisions for such high-capacity cards. During the interview, you can hear him talking about content portability -- being able to easily move videos and music from one device to another by moving just the card.

Even though he showed the card functioning, Romero made it clear that this particular 12 Gbyte would not be coming to the market anytime soon. But it's also clear from what he said that we can expect in the not too distant future some other solutions from SanDisk that build on the technology and process that it took to put 12 Gbytes onto such a small device.

In addition to the microSD card "technology demonstration," SanDisk is also showing its new 4-Gbyte Titanium USB Drive at the Consumer Electronics Show. Targeting users looking for a way to frictionlessly back their data, the message behind the Titanium USB drive is that your data will be safe for two reasons. First, the titanium case protects the drive from damage. Romero says you can run it over with a car and still not worry about it being damaged. Second, the data on the drive can automatically be synched up with a SanDisk-hosted storage service on the Internet. So, if you do lose the drive, the data is still safe on the Internet.

The Titanium USB Drive is priced at $59.99, and its corresponding service on the Internet is free for the first six months and then $29.99 per year after that.