Today in Seoul, Korea, Samsung announced a new line of flash memory products for mobile devices named moviNAND. The new series of memory allows NAND flash to be accessed through the commonly used MultiMediaCard (MMC) interface controller available in modern cell phones.
According to Samsung the moviNAND “can store up to 2,000 songs or enough map data to implement global positioning system (GPS) and points of interest for the entire western world” as well as “providing twice the capacity and [providing] double the performance of the 4GB version.” When compared to the currently used embedded flash cards, the moviNAND will be much more compact, and, in some cases, the card will be up to 20 percent smaller.
Samsung also claims that the new “moviNAND also processes data at 52 megabytes per second, using the industry’s fastest multimedia card interface”, which is a considerable step above the 40 MBps average transfer speeds of most flash-based memory devices.
The market release of Samsung’s 8GB moviNAND should occur in the second quarter of 2007, and will become the highest capacity embedded flash memory to date.
Now, imagine this amount of data capacity coupled with a mobile 3-D graphics card, and think about the gaming possibilities that are enabled with this jump in technology. Done? Now imagine the factor of sheer boredness that would make you think that 3-D gaming would be “fun” on cell-phone.
On the other hand, maybe they could put this relatively large capacity chip (or the eventual upgraded capacity) into the next generation of handhelds. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the PSP2 or next Nintendo handheld bundled with this little boost of memory?
