The debate about whether smartphones should have MicroSD card slots, one that Google themselves have attempted to settle in the past, rages on with no signs of stopping. Many are the mobile fans who write off a promising new phone entirely when it’s announced that it will lack MicroSD support. Samsung was a staunch supporter of the MicroSD slot until the Galaxy S6, which lacked the feature. They’re returning to form with the Galaxy S7 and its Edge variant, but the next time around, one of the top reasons to have a MicroSD slot may not apply. Samsung has made an official announcement marking their achievement; they have created the first ever 256GB universal flash memory.
To be specific, they have created flash memory for mobile devices that exceeds the performance of solid state drives found in some desktop computers and complies with the UFS 2.0 standard. This incredibly dense memory is already in mass production and is all set to allow the next generation of mobile devices to nullify the need to have a secondary device for storage, for most users. Data in this piece of flash memory can be moved at speeds up to about 260 megabytes per second, with reads up to 850 megabytes per second. This means, under optimal conditions, an entire music library consisting of roughly 500 MP3 files averaging 3 to 5 megabytes could be copied, not moved, from one location on memory to another in less than ten seconds. This will translate to fairly big gains in performance for next-gen smartphones that bear the technology.
The new chip is smaller than a MicroSD, allowing smartphone designers freedom to design a smartphone the way they want to without having to compromise design to allocate space for a memory chip, for the most part. This announcement comes about a year after Samsung announced their creation of a 128GB chip of a similar nature, though not quite as blazing fast as the one in this announcement. This move may also help to push along the adoption of USB 3.0 and the USB Type-C standard, as only a USB 3.0 connection would be able to take full advantage of the transfer speeds on offer when working between a mobile device and a computer.