Samsung has announced the first one terabyte chip for smartphones, heralding a future wave of phones that offer laptop-like data storage.
The 1TB storage chip is a whopping 16 times greater in size than the standard 64GB offered on current smartphones. The new storage chip is expected to usher in “a more notebook-like user experience,” Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.
That means bringing the prodigious amount of storage available on a laptop to the smartphone. Currently, 1TB – equal to 1,000 gigabytes – solid-state chip drives are found on high-end laptops but not smartphones. But as smartphone app sizes and photo file sizes have increased, so has the demand for more storage, Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst at market researcher IDC, told Fox News.
“Samsung certainly plays right into that,” Ubrani said. “I think one of the biggest selling points of a 1 terabyte phone would be the fact that users wouldn’t need to rely on the cloud for their storage needs.”
Phone makers continue to up the ante with more sophisticated cameras capable of 4K video that can gobble up gigabytes of data in a few minutes, which drives the need for more storage.
Larger storage chips also mean more speed. Samsung’s 1TB chip allows “users to transfer large amounts of multimedia content in significantly reduced time,” Samsung said.
For instance, a 5GB-sized video can be offloaded in as little as five seconds, which is 10 times the speed of typical microSD cards that are offered as options on some smartphones, according to Samsung. This will enable things like high-speed continuous shooting at a blazing 960 frames per second for super slow-mo shots.
Currently, the minimum amount of storage on most premium smartphones is 64GB. “It wasn’t too long ago when 16GB was considered the standard on flagship phones,” IDC’s Ubrani added.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9 currently maxes out at 512GB of built-in storage, as does Apple’s largest-capacity iPhone XS.
Samsung is widely expected to debut the storage option on its upcoming Galaxy S10, slated to be unveiled Feb. 20.