Nokia and Sony Ericsson join SD Card Association — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Memory, security, location} Nokia and Sony Ericsson join SD Card Association

6 Nov 2004 at 05:37 GMT Timo Poropudas

Cellular handset giants Nokia and Sony Ericsson have joined the SD Card Association (SDA). Nokia joined SDA as a member of its Board of Directors. Sony Ericsson and Nokia join Motorola, Samsung, palmOne, Sharp, Panasonic, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, Kyocera and other leading makers of SD and miniSD-enabled mobile phones around the world. The SD Memory Card is the number one semiconductor memory card in use worldwide today, and is found in a wide array of consumer electronics products such as digital cameras, camcorders, PDAs, laptop computers, digital audio players and many other products. In total, 2,877 models in 31 product categories by 238 brands supporting the SD standard have been shipped to date. According to market analyst firm Gartner, Inc., the SD Card has shown impressive growth since its introduction in 2000, capturing 30 percent of the worldwide market in revenue in 2003. Gartner projects SD's share to increase to 38 percent by 2008. "With mobile phones now offering built-in, high-resolution camera functions, content downloading capabilities, and compatibility with PC data, there is a clear need for removable memory cards that support these capabilities," said Ray Creech, President, SD Card Association. "This is the fruition of the hard work the SDA's Mobile Phone Task Force, formed earlier this year, and shows the SD Memory Card's strength in the wireless communications industry," said John P. Burnham, Global Director of Marketing Communications for the SDA. In addition to the Mobile Phone Task Force, the SD Card Association established a Mobile Commerce specification, smartSD, that adds "smart card" security and other functionalities to the format. The SDA also approved the SD Map Specification that will help enable Location Based Services. (The MobileMonday November 29th event in Helsinki will focus on location based services.) The SD Card Association is an open industry standards organization established in January 2000 by Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), SanDisk and Toshiba, and is supported by a consortium of over 700 companies.