Cell Phone Memory Card Market Set for Steady Growth

With increasing demand for higher storage capacities of cell phones, the sales of removable memory cards is expected to grow continuously in the coming years, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics.

Based on the report, there were almost 685 million handsets equipped with an expansion card slot in 2008, which amounted to nearly 60 percent of all handset shipments. By the end of 2013, shipments of slotted phones are set to reach 990 million units, making up approximately 70 percent of all cell phone shipments.

While the microSD format continues to dominate the slotted handset market, the higher capacity microSDHC format has been boosting from representing 3.5 percent of slotted phones in 2007 to 22 percent in 2008, and to around 54 percent in 2009. The surge is driven by consumers’ ever-increasing needs for more memory to store music, images, video, games and data in their multimedia-focused handsets.

In the meantime, due to rapid decline in the cost of NAND flash memory, we will also see more high-end phones with large onboard memory but no slot in the next two to three years, says Stuart Robinson, author of the report. Still, the abilities to expand phone capacity and to transfer data to a new phone give removable memory cards advantages over embedded memory.

Examples of new mobile devices that accept microSDHC memory cards can be easily found on the market: HTC Hero, HTC Tilt 2, Samsung Instinct HD, Motorola Cliq and BlackBerry 9700 Onyx. Smartphones like iPhone and Palm Pre do not come with an expansion slot, but offer significant flash memory as large as 32GB. Some handsets, such as Nokia N97, take the benefits from both by integrating with 32GB flash memory as well as a microSDHC card slot.

Strategy Analytics believes that the domination of microSD cards has slowed down the introduction of new formats. However, new developments will be essential to increase capacity beyond 32GB and to improve read/write speeds above 100mbps. New technologies from the industry, like microSDXC, could steer slotted phones in the right direction to be competitive with embedded memory in cell phones.

Tags: Memory Card, MicroSD / TransFlash Memory Card, M2 Memory Stick Micro Memory Cards, USB Flash Memory, Memory Stick PRO Duo, SD (Secure Digital) Memory Card, MultiMedia Cards (MMC)