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Hitachi Shrinks Memory Card Down to Size

Reduced-Size MultiMedia Card offers the same amount of storage in a smaller package for your mobile devices.

Kuriko Miyake, IDG News Service

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Hitachi unveiled Monday a small-sized multimedia card aimed at mobile devices such as digital still cameras and PDAs.

The RS-MMC, for Reduced-Size MultiMedia Card, is a half-in-length version of a standard MMC, measuring .9 inches by .7 inches by .05 inches and weighing approximately two-tenths of an ounce. The RS-MMC, which has seven pins, can be used in the same slot as an MMC.

The MultiMedia Card Association approved the RS-MMC standard on November 11 and Hitachi's product is the first to be commercialized, according to a statement from the Tokyo company.

Like a standard MMC, an RS-MMC can be also plugged into the Secure Digital card slot when using an adaptor, says Chieko Yoda, a Hitachi spokesperson. The SD card is a secured version of MMC, which was first introduced in 2000, and about 500 companies now support the SD card standard, releasing many products carrying a SD card slot. An MMC or an RS-MMC can be put into an SD card slot and unsecured data can be transferred to it, she says.

A lot of digital content doesn't need to be secure and so SD will complement MMC not replace it, Yoda says.

Coming Soon

16MB, 32MB and 64MB cards are available from Hitachi, which started shipping samples of the products Monday. The company hopes to start mass production of the products in the second quarter next year, Yoda says. The prices are expected to be around the same as, or slightly higher than the standard MMC, she said. A 64MB standard MMC is currently sold for around $41 in Japan.

The company plans to release a 128MB and a 256MB card in the second half of 2003, it says.

Sony also recently shrunk its Memory Stick card for smaller mobile devices with the release of the Memory Stick Duo in July. It is one of the smallest flash memory cards available in the market at present, measuring .8 inches by 1.2 inches by .06 inches.

Digital still camera makers, Fuji Photo Film and Olympus Optical, attempting to develop more compact cameras, released their version of a smaller flash memory card called the Extreme Digital Picture Card, measuring .8 inches by 1.2 inches by .06 inches, in July.

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