Samsung announced today that it has begun mass-producing Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) microSD cards. The UHS-1 interface supports the higher performance levels required on newer LTE smartphones and tablets.

“MicroSD cards with a UHS-1 interface offer users an extremely high level of performance on their LTE smartphones and for other advanced mobile applications. This allows consumers to enjoy high-quality images and video playback directly from the memory cards, which fully support the advanced performance features of diverse digital gadgets,” said Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Our UHS-1 card demonstrates how Samsung plans to continually expand its line-up of memory cards in accommodating the market need for higher densities and greater performance.”

The new microSD card only comes in a 16 gigabyte version so far. It uses Samsung’s 64 gigabit toggle DDR 2.0 devices and a Samsung controller that supports the UHS-1 interface. Samsung claims that internal tests the “maximum sequential read speed” of the card is 80 megabytes per second. Normal microSD cards operate at 21 megabytes per second.

Production of this microSD card began in late march, and Samsung says it plans to upgrade all of its microSD cards with higher density solutions. Hopefully this will mean microSD cards we can use in all of our different mobile and portable devices to quickly stream HD media in the near future.

(photo courtesy Baran Ivo)