This tiny card will give your smartphone 200 GB of storage

The days of deleting apps
and photos from your
phone to free up storage
may soon be history.
SanDisk ( ) has unveiled the
world's most spacious storage card
for smartphones. The catchy-named
"SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I
card, Premium Edition," comes with
200 gigabyte
s of storage. That's 72
GB more storage than the next-
largest option on the market.
But before you get too excited,
cramming all that capacity on a tiny
microSD card the size of your
fingernail isn't for everyone.
High-capacity storage is extremely
expensive stuff. SanDisk said it will
go on sale sometime in the spring --
and cost $400 .
Also, many newer phones also don't
come with expandable storage. The
Apple ( , Tech30 ) iPhone has
never allowed customers to insert
SD cards to grow its storage
capacity, and Samsung ( ) just
eliminated that option from its new
Galaxy S6 smartphone.
If you want all that storage in your
phone but can't get it, don't
despair. SanDisk also makes
internal storage for smartphones,
and you could one day see a 200
GB iPhone or Android phone hit
store shelves.
Storage prices also tend to come
down over time. Apple just
increased the capacity of its two
larger-capacity iPhones this past
year, doubling customers' storage
without raising the price of the
iPhone.
As smartphones become our
primary cameras, those huge photo
and video files tend to eat up space
pretty quickly. A growing number of
cloud storage options, including
Google+ ( , Tech30 ) Photos,
Amazon ( , Tech30 ) Cloud
Drive, Apple iCloud and Dropbox
are making photo backup much
easier -- but you still have to erase
the photos from your phone when
your on-board storage space fills up.
SanDisk's 200 GB of extra storage
would pretty much eliminate the
need to methodically erase stuff
from your phone.
The company also says that the SD
card will allow super-fast transfer
rates, allowing customers to move
1,200 photos per minute from a
phone to a computer.