The days of deleting apps and photos from your phone to free up storage may soon be history.
SanDisk has unveiled the world’s most spacious storage card for smartphones. The catchy-named “SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition,” comes with 200 gigabytes of storage. That’s 72 GB more storage than the next-largest option on the market.
But before you get too excited, cramming all that capacity on a tiny microSD card the size of your fingernail isn’t for everyone.
High-capacity storage is extremely expensive stuff. SanDisk said it will go on sale sometime in the spring — and cost $400.
Also, many newer phones also don’t come with expandable storage. The Apple iPhone has never allowed customers to insert SD cards to grow its storage capacity, and Samsung just eliminated that option from its new Galaxy S6 smartphone.
If you want all that storage in your phone but can’t get it, don’t despair. SanDisk also makes internal storage for smartphones, and you could one day see a 200 GB iPhone or Android phone hit store shelves.
Storage prices also tend to come down over time. Apple just increased the capacity of its two larger-capacity iPhones this past year, doubling customers’ storage without raising the price of the iPhone.
As smartphones become our primary cameras, those huge photo and video files tend to eat up space pretty quickly. A growing number of cloud storage options, including Google+ Photos, Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple iCloud and Dropbox are making photo backup much easier — but you still have to erase the photos from your phone when your on-board storage space fills up.
SanDisk’s 200 GB of extra storage would pretty much eliminate the need to methodically erase stuff from your phone.
The company also says that the SD card comes with an app that will allow super-fast transfer rates, allowing customers to move 1,200 photos per minute from a phone to a computer.