Flashback: the rise (and fall?) of the microSD card - GSMArena.com news - GSMArena.com

The recent shopping spree had us looking at great deals for microSD cards and with that came the sad realization that many of us no longer have a phone with a memory expansion slot.

This sent us on a walk down memory lane to revisit the history of the microSD.

A few years ago we did a retrospective of the memory card, covering MMC, SD, Memory Stick and the like.

Today we want to focus on microSD exclusively because – for better or for worse – this is the card that won the format wars.

With very few exceptions it was the memory card format of choice for most makers.

The first phone to use the new card format was certainly a Motorola – there are a few models that came out in 2004, but evidence points towards the Motorola E398 being the first.

The ROKR was a failure, but the phone that followed was, let’s just say, a huge success.

This was useful for plugging the card into a computer to load it up with songs or to download the photos and videos you shot on your phone.

This file system allowed for not just large cards but for large files too (up to 4GB).

In fact, even decade plus old SDXC format is yet to become a limiting factor as the biggest microSD cards currently on the market have 1TB capacity.

The world's first 1TB microSD card arrived in 2019 with a price of $450.

The simplest rating is just something like “class 2”, which is marked on the card as a 2 inside a C.

The faster the card, the faster you can copy files to it.

Putting an extra row of pins on the large SD cards was easy enough, however, the size of microSD posed a challenge.

UHS-II microSD cards do exist, but they are rare and pricey.

Even more rare seem to be devices that actually support UHS-II microSD cards.

Even without UHS-II the cards are good enough for high resolution video capture, but the rise of smartphones introduced a new challenge.

So far we have talked about the memory card as storage for multimedia – MP3s and videos.

Apps and games need fast random access and most cards just aren’t designed for that.

SD Express requires the extra pins similar to UHS, which hinders adoption on the tiny microSD cards?

Spotify, Netflix, YouTube and the like mean you don’t need all that storage on your phone

Mobile gaming is now bigger than PC and console gaming combined, but that won’t boost adoption of microSD for the reasons discussed above

A game large enough to have trouble fitting in the internal storage will also be too demanding to run off the card

Smartphone maker drop the micro sd slot for their flagship phone, so they can sell the higher capacity storage with much2 higher price

I still find it hilarious when you have to pay $100 to get an extra 128GB of internal storage when you can easily get a genuine 256GB or even 512GB microSD card with a lifetime warranty for half the price, and yet there are still so-called &quo..