Samsung, which supplies NAND flash for a variety of smartphone makers, recently announced that they’ve produced a 128GB (GigaBytes) NAND chip–twice the density of the current NAND storage champion, which checks in at 64GB on a single chip. We can probably expect this chip to end up in the–surprise–Galaxy S III as well as other high-end smartphones. The chips are plenty capable. They read data at 140Mb/s and write data at 50Mb/s.
Although 128GB of built-in storage was a common request for the iPhone 5, it was not an available upgrade during this cycle. Apple may not be able to provide a 128GB version next year, because it recently moved its NAND flash supplier from Samsung–currently the only company producing a 128GB chip–to the other big three suppliers, Toshiba, SanDisk and Hynix.
So we’re probably going to see 128GB built-in storage on Android and Windows Phones before we see it on an iPhone. Full press release here.
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