SanDisk Announces the First 32GB microSDHC Card, But Your Phone Probably Won’t Support It

It was going to happen eventually: with its latest generation of microSD cards, SanDisk doubled the size of its largest card from 16GB to 32GB. The card is on sale now at SanDisk.com for $199. U.S. and European customers can have it now; everyone else can wait until next month.

We suppose we’re not surprised that SanDisk is now selling 32GB microSD cards. But we do have to wonder if perhaps SanDisk has grown out of touch with where mobile devices are going these days.

The iPhone doesn’t have a memory card slot, nor does the Amazon Kindle. The Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus don’t, and neither will any device running Windows Phone 7. And while Android phones accept memory cards for loading music and videos onto the phone, you can’t save applications on them.

You get the idea. Whether because devices can now have 32GB of internal memory (take the iPhone, for example) or just because of poor design choices (Android), there aren’t as many microSD card slots out there anymore. It would be an exaggeration to say this is the last gasp for mobile memory cards– people still need ‘em to store photos, music, and videos, especially on phones that don’t pack a lot of internal memory. And we can’t forget about other devices that take microSD cards, like the Sprint OverDrive modem that uses microSD to double as a mobile file server. However, as more and more storage moves into the cloud or into internal memory, the SD memory arms race becomes less and less important.