New Memory Card Format Aimed at 3G Phones

Motorola will be using a new memory card format in their new phones (the E1000 and A1000, reported here this week), with capacities from 32mb to 512mb. These new cards are about half the size of a SIM, making them slightly smaller than the miniSD format, which was launched less than a year ago.

The cards are intended to be removable so that users can share files or transfer data. The specification for the cards will be open, so other manufacturers will be able to adopt it. No details for performance or electrical characteristics have been released yet.

Chances are then, that your PDA, phone, games console, MP3 player, robot dog and camera will all use entirely different memory cards. If that’s not enough to send you sobbing down to the shops to get a new all-in-one device, then we don’t know what is.

PC World almost seem pleased

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?