In the early days of wireless, users could expect their phones to store, perhaps, 100 names and phone numbers. Today, users in some cases can expect their phones to hold an entire half-hour TV show, complete with audio and video.
Such advances in storage create significant new opportunities in wireless. Imagine: A “Simpsons” fan could buy the entire first season of the TV show on quarter-sized cards, which could then be slipped into a phone’s memory card slot for viewing. Or an MP3 buff could download a few hundred songs onto a storage card and listen to them later using a mobile phone.
“It’s going to be one of the bigger opportunities for cell phones in the next five years,” said Mario Morales, vice president of semiconductors for research firm IDC.
Indeed, some advanced mobile phones currently operate much like desktop computers or high-end personal digital assistants, complete with large internal memories and slots for data disks. For example, the Sony Ericsson high-end P800 features 12 Megabytes of internal storage, plus a Memory Stick Duo card slot that can increase storage to as much as 100 MB. Nokia Corp.’s new 3650 smart phone also features 3.4 MB of internal storage, plus a MultiMediaCard slot that can hold around 100 MB as well. And phone makers and storage companies promise that this is just the beginning. Indeed, Microsoft Corp. executives have been showing off a device using their Smartphone operating system that includes a card with 1 Gigabyte worth of storage.
Such holding capability easily dwarfs that of desktop computers sold just five years ago.
“You’ll be able to download large quantities of information,” promised Ed Cuellar, director of OEM marketing for storage card company SanDisk Corp. “You’ll see a lot more need for higher capacity.”
IDC’s Morales said most of the memory technology in the wireless business will center on flash storage cards. The firm predicts 218 million such cards will be sold in mobile phones by 2007. Flash storage technology works by creating a charge that stays in a cell even after the system is turned off, thus lowering prices and power consumption.
“In portable devices, you typically don’t have enough power to turn a disk drive,” SanDisk’s Cuellar said.
Flash storage technology is used in MP3 players, digital cameras, PDAs and a variety of other electronics products. Flash is even used in cellular base stations, thus protecting against harsh weather and potentially inconsistent power supplies.
In mobile phones, flash storage is showing up in both internal workings and external card slots. M-Systems offers flash-based storage chips to mobile-phone manufacturers, and the company said it counts most of the major players as customers. The company said it couldn’t name specific customers.
Zack Weisfeld, associate vice president of marketing for M-Systems’ U.S. wireless operations, said the wireless industry could soon see mobile phones with up to 256 MB of internal storage. Indeed, M-Systems recently announced a new version of its DiskOnChip technology that could store 1 GB of data.
“There’ll be more and more applications on the device,” Weisfeld said.
However, such massive internal data capacity could be dwarfed by external storage slots, which would allow users to insert and remove data cards just like the diskettes for a computer’s disk drive. There are a variety of types of data cards, including MultiMediaCards, Memory Stick cards, Secure Digital cards and others. Most are the size of quarters or sticks of gum, and slip into a tiny slot on the side of a mobile phone. Nokia and others have largely embraced MMC cards, while Sony Ericsson and others use Memory Sticks. IDC’s Morales predicts SD cards will eventually dominate the market.
Morales said more and more mobile phones in the future will include memory-card slots, allowing users to store pictures, video, audio and other high-capacity data right on their mobile phones. The business cases for such technology seem endless, as entertainment providers could package TV shows, music concerts and other media in memory cards for sale to mobile-phone users. Indeed, Nokia intends to sell video games on MMC cards for use in its forthcoming N-Gage mobile-phone/video game device.
However, it could be several years before even mid-range phones see memory-card slots. Such cards usually require a significant amount of battery and computing power. Further, any applications stored in the cards would need to be reinstalled each time the card is reinserted.
But that probably won’t stop the march of the wireless memory market.
“The devices are becoming more computing-oriented,” Morales said.
