Samsung Electronics said it had developed the world's largest storage-capacity memory card for mobile phones.

The eight-gigabyte memory card, microSD, double the size of the 4GB cards just announced in February from other card makers, can store about 2,000 MP3 music files, 4,000 photographs or five DVD-quality movie files, the company said in a statement.

It is only a quarter the size of the widely-used SD card but much faster in downloading and uploading multimedia data.

According to Jim Elliot, director of flash marketing, the new cards will offer data transfer rates of 16MB/sec for reads, and 6MB/sec for writes. The cards could be put in an extender for use in full-size SD slots, as you can with other microSD cards.

Smaller than miniSD cards, and also based on the SD card format, microSD memory cards measure about 15mm x 11mm in size. This makes them ideal for use in mobile phones. The microSD format was originally developed by SanDisk before being adopted in a modified form by the Secure Digital Card Association.

SD cards are largely used for data storage in digital cameras and televisions. The statistics say the global multimedia memory card market would grow 10 percent annually until 2010.

Samsung says it doesn't plan to ship these cards until mid-2008 and the company hasn't  announced a price for the new cards.

written by Cristian L.