For those who will recognize a certain level of
sarcasm in the following text: I found some documents on
my harddisk. A press release dated 2004-08-09 announcing
the
The miCARD is supposed to have a size of 12x21x1.95mm³ offering direct USB connection and MMC interface (MMC 4.2). There will be passive adapters that allow direct use of the miCARD in SD slots, but the supported protocols are not mentioned. There are photos showing four USB pads and nine memory card pads at the bottom of the card.
The official document of the MMCA mentions "passive mechanical adaptors (...) for use in (...) products that accept full-size MMC cards". Well, regular MMC or MMCplus cards have a thickness of 1.4mm, so maybe full-size means SD/MMC slots for a thickness of 2.1mm? The thickness of 1.95mm was necessary for direct compatibilty with USB Type A host connectors.
Some sources mention 16bit interface. That will be a serious problem with only 13 pads. Even for 8bit MMC interface, they would have to use the 9 memory card pads and the 4 USB pads together to be compatible to the 13-pad MMCplus interface.
Some sources mention 120MB/s transfer rate. That would be twice as much as the USB 2.0 bitrate, and 2.3x the current MMC bitrate. But maybe that will be raised in MMC 4.2?
Then there are statements that the miCARD would be "almost as small as the microSD". If you compare length and width, that's 1.5x the area, but including the thickness that's about 3x the volume. Compared to the miniSD, they are about 80% the volume, so they are slighty smaller than miniSD. But miniSD are not that popular because of their size.
And once again, we can read stories about the new memory cards having 2TB. But that's only the address space of 41 bit, calculated from 32bit sector address and 512 bytes per sector (9 bit). Anounced are up to 8GB for a start.
The card formats of the MMCA are still promoted as royalty-free formats. But in the past, this did not keep the cards from having bad success.
The only true advantage is the direct compatibility with USB host connectors. But aren't there already SD cards with USB connector available from different manufacturers? And there are even microSD to SD adapters with USB connector, so where's the advantage over SD and microSD? And these cards are already available for quite a while, and the acceptance is not as good as it should be.
By offering the passive SD adapters, they might have a chance for acceptance amongst users of SD devices. But the SuperSD, a hybrid SD/MMCplus card, already failed to get acceptance. So once again: Where's the advantage compared to SD cards?
For use in mobile devices, especially mobile phones, the size will be a problem. microSD are very popular for use in mobile phones, especially due to their thickness of only 1mm. Slots for a card of 1.95mm thickness will most likely extend 3mm in height, which is definitely too much height for use in small form factor devices.
I would see a chance in replacing the old-fashioned USB memory stick, and the possibility to use slots with snap-in/snap-out where the card sits flush with the shell. But then, why add a memory card interface for a card standard where the new cards are actually too thick to integrate into the existing family line.
But who knows, maybe this is just a beginning, and mini-miCARD and micro-miCARD will be announced later...