PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.—As multimedia-enabled handsets flood the market, so are external memory options, according to a new report from The NPD Group.
The number of handsets equipped with removable media slots increased more than 250 percent to 2 million phones sold in the first quarter of this year, up from a half-million in the second quarter of 2005. The most popular memory card format is the microSD card, offered in half of the 2 million phones sold, followed by the miniSD card, featured in just under one-third of phones sold in the first quarter.
The cards can be used to store downloaded content from the handset and port that content to other devices, or vice versa.
Some carriers supply the memory card with the purchase of a phone, but many require the consumer to purchase their own separately, leaving it up to the consumer to determine how much memory they need for their device or content storage. According to The NPD Group, it remains uncertain whether consumers will follow suit and purchase external memory capacity in significant quantities.
