Seoul: Samsung Electronics, the world’s top memory chipmaker, announced Monday, that it has developed the industry’s first eight-gigabyte flash memory card for mobile handsets.

The “moviNAND” can store and process data twice as fast as existing four-gigbyte memory cards, the South Korean firm said in a statement.

Samsung will begin mass-production in this year’s second quarter, the company said.

The new card can store the equivalent of 2,000 songs or map data large enough to run a global positioning system, but it is up to 20 per cent smaller than its industry peers, Samsung said.

Samsung said the new memory card would help make mobile handsets smaller because it is a built-in type that requires no external card slot.

Samsung expects the market for moviNAND to be up to four billion dollars by 2010, the release said.

Labels: Chip, Electronics, Memory, Memory Chips, Samsung