Now Every Mobile Phone Can Be an iPhone

Well, not exactly. Today Samsung announced that is has developed an 8 gigabyte microSD card. Since many phones are equipped with microSD card slots, they'll be able to carry just as many songs or videos as the forthcoming iPhone. The experience probably won't be quite the same. But what the heck, that's a lot of storage for a phone.Many phones ship with very limited on-board user memory. From as little as 4 megabytes on some phones to up to 256 megabytes on some enterprise devices. With all the multimedia functions that come with phones these days, that amount of on-board storage just isn't enough to store the music, picture, and video files (oh, okay, and some work files, too) that users need. That's why many mobile phones come with microSD slots, which allow users to customize the amount of storage space on the phone to suit their needs. For feature phones, this means more multimedia files, and for enterprise devices, this means more Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs.

Now mobile phone users can store even more with Samsung's new 8 gigabyte microSD card, which holds as much as the more expensive iPhone model. Samsung claims that it will store 2,000 MP3 music files, 4,000 digital photos, or approximately 5 DVD-quality movies. The new card, which is the size of a fingernail, also has a read speed of 16 megabytes per second and a write speed of 6 megabytes per second. That means faster interaction with media and files on the card.

Samsung didn't announce pricing for the card just yet, but you can be sure it won't be cheap. A quick spot check of some online retailers shows that 2 gigabyte microSD cards run about $50, depending on how fast they are. The new cards will likely cost well more than $100, which is more than many of the phones that support microSD cards (excluding smartphones).

The bottom line is that more mobile phones will have the capability to store large amounts of files, whatever they may be, just like the iPhone.