Is that a 128GB Smartphone in Your Pocket? Holy Cow, it Is!

Posted 06/17/2010 at 7:11am | by Paul Lilly

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You know that 32GB iPhone 4 you just pre-ordered? The amount of internal storage is going to seem comparatively quaint if Toshiba follows through with its plan to mass produce 128GB embedded NAND flash memory modules by the end of this year.

That's right folks, 128 awesome gigabytes of storage capacity could become standard on everything from high-end smartphones to tablet PCs, digital cameras, and everywhere else you find embedded flash chips. It's the highest capacity yet achieved in the industry, part of which is the result of Toshiba's 32nm manufacturing technology. The other part of the equation involves stuffing sixteen 64Gbit (equal to 8GB) NAND chips onto a dedicated controller into a package measuring just 17 x 22 x 1.4mm.

The implications here are huge, especially with competition ramping up in the mobile market. With 1GHz Snapdragon chips strutting through the smartphone scene and 2GHz chips on the horizon, smartphones are finally powerful enough to truly be considered handheld PCs. And with a spate of Android, WebOS, and Windows 7 tablets on the horizon, Apple's flagship 64GB iPad could suddenly become far less appealing, and for reasons other than lack of Flash support.

Image Credit: Toshiba