Sandisk Corporation announced at the MWC 2014 in Barcelona a high-capacity microSDXC to expand an Android smartphone's storage capacity. SanDisk, is the world's leader in storage solutions. Its 128GB2 microSDX UHS-I memory card, the largest capacity card existing today.

Dethroning the 64GB microSD

The smaller-than-fingernail card enables consumers to use their tablets and phones and make storage limitations not a concern. With a 128GB capacity (64GB is the highest capacity for Android devices so far), they can limitlessly capture thousands of photos, songs and videos in one removable card.

Bloatwares

One of the challenges with Android devices is how to address preloaded carrier and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) bloatware which cannot be easily removed. Since they occupy a great amount of space, they can affect the overall speed and performance of the device.

In South Korea, a government law forces carriers and device manufacturers to allow users to delete apps that they find useless. In other countries, there may not be such law, thus, users resort to rooting their devices to remove unwanted software to improve performance.

Using a microSD card is another (and simpler) solution to address this problem - the higher the capacity of the card, the better.

Price and drawbacks

The SanDisk Ultra is priced at $199.99 (discounted $80 at Amazon), and allows user to save up to 16 hours of Full HD video, 7500 songs, 3200 photos and over 125 apps as estimated by its company. Aside from the high price, the item may have a drawback.

For instance, other Android devices may have no microdSD on the device, or lack of microSD support. So far, the Galaxy S5 can use 128GB microSD cards. Other future device should be SanDisk-compatible too. It is noteworthy too that in Galaxy S5, its ROM uses half of 16GB built-in memory, even with its presentation suggesting that its maker dialed down on the bloatware department.

For buyers of unibody Android devices which do not have slots for microSD , there is always an option to buy cheap microSD card readers which can run the new 128GB microSD card through a USB OTG connection.

Another solution is the cloud virtual storage which requires a permanent Internet connection to access the files.