Sandisk, well-known maker of storage accessories like the Connect Wireless Drive, made an announcement on their blog that they had created a new gold standard for flagship mobile multimedia. This standard is known as EPIC, which is short for Extreme Photo Imaging Capabilities. The new EPIC standard, in a nutshell, defines minimum standards for a flagship smartphone to possess, in both hardware and software, in order to be endorsed by Sandisk for multimedia consumption and production. According to Sandisk’s blog post, a partnership with HTC has seen the new HTC 10 become the first flagship handset to meet the lofty standards and be declared EPIC compliant.
EPIC standards are meant to ensure optimal user experience in the areas of imaging, audio and handset design. As such, the standards look at a few main areas to see if a handset is compliant. These are the processor, the cameras, the built in storage, the overall hardware and the system software, among others. In the camera department, Sandisk is looking for at least 13 megapixels, along with 4K video capability. Other specifications, such as OIS, aperture size and RAW imaging standards used were strangely left out of the minimum specification declaration. As for storage, naturally, Sandisk asks OEMs looking to be noted as EPIC to include at least 32GB of Sandisk’s own high-speed i7132 or 7132 NAND storage. Capping off the minimum specs for compliance is the need for the device to run Android 5.1 Lollipop or higher, along with full compatibility with the Google Camera 2 API.
The types of Sandisk NAND named in the EPIC standard are fairly high-end and provide users with great read and write performance, as well as good throughput and durability. When dealing with high-resolution video files, lossless audio files and large photos, having an abundance of fast storage is just as important as a decent processor and audiovisual setup to both capture and output the multimedia. To demonstrate the capabilities of devices wielding the minimum equipment necessary to net an EPIC certification, Sandisk had two of their people, Robbie Cavanagh and Dave Newton, come together with a few HTC 10 units to produce a hybrid music video and behind the scenes introspective, which can be viewed at the source link.