First miniSD Card phone coming

SanDisk Corporation today announced that it will supply miniSD cards for the first mobile phones that include a miniSD slot.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s leading mobile communication company with more than 45 million subscribers, has debuted this week the NTT DoCoMo i-mode cellular phone 505i series that feature a miniSD slot. Certain 505i mobile phones will be bundled with a 16 megabyte (MB) miniSD card supplied by SanDisk.

MiniSD cards are designed to provide high capacity storage in an ultra-small, removable card. As the world’s smallest flashstorage card, the miniSD card is uniquely qualified to meet the memory-intensive storage requirements of new generation mobile phones such as the NTT DoCoMo 505i series that include high performance digital cameras, video capture, MP3 playback, video games, personal information management (PIM), and email.

Bo Ericsson, SanDisk’s vice president of OEM marketing, said, “The NTT DoCoMo 505i series represents a new generation of mobile phones that are differentiated by their advanced multimedia capabilities and memory card support. Even with their compact design, these models are capable of capturing digital still images up to 1.3-megapixel, video capture, music replay, and Internet messaging. We expect to start shipments of miniSD cards in the current quarter to a several Japanese vendors that will bundle them in their 505i models supplied to NTT DoCoMo. We also plan to sell the miniSD cards at higher capacities in Japanese retail outlets starting in Q2 2003 so that users of these mobile phones can add storage as their needs for storing pictures, music and personal data expand over time.”

The miniSD card is specifically designed for the new generation of 2.5G and 3G mobile phones that require removable storage in the smallest possible form factor. Based on the SD card, the miniSD card will work in all devices that support an SD slot via an SD adapter that is included with each miniSD card sold at retail. This allows consumers to easily share their images, music and other data between their 505i mobile phones and the more than 900 SD devices including digital cameras, PDAs and computers that are already in the market.

At retail, SanDisk will initially offer miniSD cards in 32 and 64MB capacities, with 128MB available later this year and 256MB available early next year. The miniSD cards will use SanDisk’s NAND flash and SD controller technology. Suggested retail pricing for the 32MB miniSD card is Â¥2780. Prices on higher capacities have not been set.