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Mobile phones have long ceased to be just phones. Even sub-100 dollar handsets boast colour displays and music playback facilities. For instance, NXP's Nexperia platform costs less $20, but includes GPRS, FM Radio and music playing capabilities. It is unsurprising that smartphones and feature phones constitute the fastest growing segment among all phones categories.

As mobile phones begin to resemble conventional computers, it is worthwhile drawing a few parallels. Mobile phones, especially smartphones, have ROM and RAM memory functions that behave in more or less in the same fashion as they do in PCs. In this article, we concentrate on the storage memory (ROM, Flash and others) and not the processing memory (RAM).

Handset storage memory can be broadly divided into two categories: on-board memory and removable memory. The former is predominantly flash while the latter is dominated by consortium-specific formats such as Secure Digital (SD), Multimedia Card (MMC) and Memory Stick Micro (M2).

The iPhone has all its 8GB on board, in form of a flash store, but Apple isn't alone in provisioning giant size flash memory: Nokia recently launched the upgraded N95 and N81 with 8GB of Flash memory. Flash is as specialized EEPROM that can be programmed at the block level and this block level programmability lends a level of agility not found in normal EEPROMs. Flash is known to score more highly on reliability and energy efficiency.

On the flip side, the added memory forces the OEM to curtail other features due to constraints in mobile phone real estate and bill of material costs. In the case of the iPhone, Apple has excluded 3G connectivity, Bluetooth enabled file transfer, a flash and video recording for the digital camera, QWERTY keyboard and GPS, among others. In the delicately balanced cost dynamics of the mobile phone, on-board memory is a rather rigid entity.

This is where removable memory steps in. Removable memory, available in the form of cards, is presently in vogue with manufacturers. MMCs are rewritable storage data cards based on flash memory that offer transfer speeds up to 416Mbps in their latest versions MMCplus and MMCmobile. Available in 13-pin contacts, these cards support dual-voltage operation (1.8 and 3/3.3V), and multiple bus widths (x1, x4 and x8 bit). The MMC standard is driven by the MMC Association (MMCA), which does not collect royalties, making the format cost effective.

MMCs are compatible with SD card as well. SD cards are similar to MMC cards, but have additional security features in the form of the Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) technology, which manages authentication based access to these devices. In the era of increased DRM consciousness, the security feature forms a crucial differentiator for SD cards. They are available as Mini SD and Micro SD, depending on the form factor.

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