Another Card Format?

Just when you thought that the multitude of memory cards out in the market
are enough to make you puke, listen to this. Sony and SanDisk today
announced a smaller Memory Stick card format; Memory Stick Micro or M2,
designed to be used with mobile phones, being a card that can be inserted
into a mobile phone case slot, and used to store pictures, music and videos.

M2 measures 15 millimeters (mm) by 12.5mm by 1.2mm, significantly smaller
than the Memory Stick Duo card format, measuring 31mm by 20mm by 1.6mm. M2
cards can be inserted and removed up to 12,000 times. M2 is compatible with
Memory Stick Pro it can be loaded into an adapter card and inserted into a
Memory Stick Pro slot on a notebook computer - such as Sony's Vaio, a video
recorder, PlayStation, TV, even kiosks in Japan, and have content loaded
onto it. Memory Stick is the second most popular memory card format, with a
quarter of the world memory card production volume, second to the SD format
with 41 percent, according to industry researcher TSR. The MMC format is
third with 12 percent. In Sony's fiscal 2004, over 50 million Memory Stick
cards were shipped, with cumulative shipments of 100 million since the
format arrived in 1998.

Memory Stick isn't a world-wide standard like VHS, but nor is it a failed
format like Betamax.

Sony has digital rights management (DRM) technology, called Magic Gate, on
all Memory Stick formats, which allows content providers to specify none,
limited or totally free copying rights. The card isn't locked to the
particular device it happens to be in.

M2 runs on either 1.8 volts or 3.3 volts, making it suitable for mobile
phones from a power usage point of view. It also has an eject control design
intended to prevent cards flying out of phones and getting lost. The
insertion slot is intended to be on the outside of the phone, making M2
insertion and removal much easier than a SIM card or battery.

M2 can hold 1GB and has a roadmap out to 32GB. A 1GB card could have 2 hours
20 minutes of QVGA 768Kbit/s video stored on it. Memory Stick Pro holds 4GB,
Duo 2GB. In general capacities on such flash memory formats are doubling
every twelve months or less. We should be able to expect a 2GB M2 card in a
few months after the 1GB card becomes available in the first half of 2006. A
4GB M2 card might arrive in 2008.

Just days ago SanDisk announced a rival micro SD format memory card, the
Gruvi. It also has a DRM facility, a different one. Nice for SanDisk; it can
punt two micro memory card formats to the phone and content companies.