BAG

Thursday 25 February 2016

About IT

Your Next Phone Could Have a Whole 256 GB of Storage

New chips are coming and they are bigger than ever before.

It’s super annoying when your phone runs out of storage and you have to go around deleting apps before you can take a few pictures or download a podcast. And even if you want a ton of space, the most you can get is 128 GB. Not for long. Samsung has just announced the world’s first 256 GB chips, and they could be coming soon to a phone near you.

In the past few years, solid state hard drives have gotten ridiculously big, up into the multiple terabytes ( 1000 GB) and climbing. But phones tend to use a different, faster kind of memory-Universal Flash Storage- that hasn’t been growing in quite the same way.

Samsung’s new 256 GB means that phones and tablets will no longer be capped at 128 GB max (plus an extra SD card on some Android phones), and while that may sound like an absurd amount of space, you could conceivably need it if you’re recording 4K video or downloading apps for VR.

And yes, more storage is good, but you’ll probably have to pay out the nose for it. Smartphone makers (Apple specifically) has set a precedent for charging RM 422.41 ($100) extra every time you double the storage, so a theoretical 256 GB model could cost RM 422.41 ($100) more than the current 128 GB versions, RM 844.82 ($200) more than the 64 GB, and a whopping RM 1689.64 ($200) more than the 16 GB base model.

Of course none of this is for sure – Apple might not even adopt the chips-but you can bet that whenever these start showing up, they won’t be particularly cheap. Maybe just move to the cloud instead.