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Somethin' To Talk About

Yet, another external storage format - Seriously?

By Joni Blecher Follow me on Twitter | Friday, September 14, 2007 (permalink)
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People don't typically get excited or particularly interested in storage formats and it's usually because if you're thinking of storage that usually leads you to thinking about losing data, songs, pictures or any other pertinent information you're storing. What does this have to do with cell phones? Well, apparently there's another external storage format in the works. According to this SF Gate article, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and others are teaming up to create a "universal storage format." While in theory, it's a good idea to have one storage format, I'm not sure it will ever come to pass and if it does what happens to "legacy" storage formats and the devices that support them?

Right now, cell phones have it pretty good, most of them use MicroSD cards that are pretty interchangeable between cell phones, however, you might need to reformat the card depending on the different phones you use with it. But still, that's pretty good. A few use MiniSD cards, which can be a little bigger and then of course, there are the Sony Ericsson cell phones that use a mobile version of the Memory Stick. We won't have to worry about the new storage format until 2009, but for it truly to be "universal" a lot of companies have to all be on board. My question is if they really wanted a storage format that fits all cell phones (let alone all mobile devices, while nice, is a little ambitious) why doesn't everyone just get on the MicroSD format bus?

MicroSD card