The Android world has always toppled Apple’s iOS over one major thing – microSD card support. This has even led to suggestions that Apple might drop the 16GB model for a much better 32GB version with the upcoming iPhone 7 as it looks to make up for the lack of expandable storage.
Samsung leads the way in smartphone sales, be it in the U.S. or all over the world. The Korean tech giant, however, also deals with other hardware, including microSD cards, display panels as well as processors, just to name but a few. While microSD cards are what dominate the Android world, some devices are turning to Apple-like storage options, for instance, the newly released OnePlus 3.
Apparently, Samsung has other ideas with respect to its microSD card business. The company is ready to ditch this technology in favor of a newer and much better UFS (Universal Flash Storage) technology. The tech giant has announced the first UFS memory cards and they are equipped with storages of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. When it comes to performance speeds, this UFS memory card technology is miles away when compared to the outdated microSD card technology.
Given that UFS cards carry sequential read speeds that can hit 530 megabytes per second, they will be five times faster than the current microSD cards. In short, Samsung says that it will be possible for a device to read a 5GB Full HD movie in about 10 seconds as opposed to the 50 seconds taken by UHS-1 microSD cards.
It gets even better when it comes to writing speeds. The new Samsung UFS memory cards can manage rates of up to 170MB/s, which is about twice the performance speed you can find with the best microSD card. According to the company, the shift from microSD card technology to UFS is a needed one thanks to the high-resolution videos and photos that current devices capture.
Samsung recently moved to UFS standard when it came in with Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S7 series, but this is the first time this is happening with an external storage device. The tech giant has also not gone public with the details of the price and actual availability of these UFS memory cards.