If your smartphone comes with only 16GB of onboard storage but also sports a microSD card, it’s not such a bad trade-off. However having more native storage is always a good thing as it means that accessing its data is faster, like accessing your computer’s hard drive versus an external hard drive.
So far the majority of smartphones we’ve seen comes with a maximum storage of 128GB, but Samsung is here to up the ante by announcing a 256GB UFS 2.0 memory chip which in their own words, is designed for high-end mobile devices. The company also announced that mass production is underway and they are hoping it will start making its way into smartphones in the near future.
So apart from the added native storage, is there anything else we should be excited about? Indeed there is. For starters it will be able to read data up to 850MB/s, putting it on par with most SATA SSDs for computers, or in some cases even outperforming some of the lower-end models. Sequential write speeds can also go up to 260MB/s.
Presumably the added storage and read/write speeds are in preparation of higher-quality content that we can expect from videos, such as those recorded in 4K resolution. It could also be for virtual reality where we can expect higher quality VR videos as well. Unfortunately it did not make the cut in the Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge, but hey, there’s always the Galaxy Note 6 to look forward to, right?