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If you are anything like me, you’ll be carrying around increasing amounts of data on your phone. We are way past the time when all it had to store was a few details of contacts and maybe some text messages, and now we expect it to hold emails, documents, e-books, music, movies, photographs and a whole load of other stuff besides. It’s not so long ago that the idea of getting close to filling up a 32GB card was inconceivable, yet here we are today with increasing numbers of users demanding even more storage. The 64GB micro SD card looks like being the answer, at least for a while, so what can you expect from one?

First the good news. They still conform to the micro SD standard in terms of size, so you’ve got a card which is just 1mm thick and 11mm by 15mm. It’ll fit into your phones card slot just like smaller capacity cards, so you get the storage capacity of an IPod Nano (remember those?) in something smaller than your thumbnail. You will also get the same fast data retrieval as you have right now. In fact, you might even notice a significant improvement, depending on how old and who the manufacturer of your previous card was. These latest incarnations of the micro SD stable can manage transfer rates of up to 30mb per second, but be warned they are unlikely to be able to sustain that.

On the downside, because this is fairly new technology the price comes with a premium. Originally launched in 2011 at around the £150 mark, they are still expensive but are gradually getting cheaper and can now be had for about £60-£70. That puts them right in the ‘just about affordable’ range for most people, but it’s still more than twice the current price of the 32GB version, so work out if the extra storage is worth the premium before you take the plunge.

There is one potential technical issue with the 64GB Micro SD card too, and that is that the format is different from that of smaller capacity cards. The new larger capacity ones are referred to as SDXC – the XC stands for ‘Extended Capacity’ and because it’s relatively new hardware manufacturers are yet to catch up. So, when you read through the specs for that new phone you’ve had your eye on for a while, it’s likely to say that it supports the older SDHC (High Capacity) format and won’t even mention the new format. Don’t write it off yet though, there is a workaround, but you’ll have to experiment whether it will work on your particular phone. To give it a go, all you need to do is put the 64GB card into the new phone and see if it complains. If it does, you may well be given the option to re-format the card, and allowing the phone to do this will probably solve the issue, letting you store twice as much data as you did before! web2logs