Yet another type of flash card...........

Transflash or micro Secure Digital as it is sometimes called, is a relatively new variety of non-volatile storage that has come onto the market in the past year. This type of storage generally is sold with a "SD adapter" that lets you use this card in any SD reader/writer or any device designed to accept SD storage cards.

I've only ever seen one device that uses these cards currently common to the consumer and that's my motorola v360i cell phone. The v360i has a transflash drive underneath the battery cover for the cell phone. This phone has a camera and that's probably the primary reason they provided the extra storage but at least on this phone you can put lots of stuff, not just camera shots on the transflash card if you desire.

When these cards first came out they were only available in relatively small sizes....the 128 mb came out first then the 256 and 512 mb and now we have 1 gigabyte transflash (and I believe I may have even seen a larger one than that for sale). These cards are very tiny, so tiny I'm afraid of losing them so they're always kept in the provided plastic case with the adapter when they aren't in the phone.

Manufacturer:
Sandisk is the only company making these cards as far as I've seen; perhaps if they catch on more there will be more choices of brand later. Sandisk offers a decent warranty and I've never heard anything bad about their products.

What I think of it:
I object to all the different types of flash memory coming out on the market. Compact flash was first, then there was another type that never really caught on, then there was Secure Digital which is still very good and small for the storage capacity they provide, and now days we've got xd, transflash, and sony memory stick. These cards have gotten a lot cheaper than they used to be but it's objectionable to me to have to buy new cards all the time because someone chose to use a card standard that I don't already have some cards for.

When I bought my last point and shoot digital camera I took my second choice because it used SD instead of xD cards and I didn't want another memory type to deal with. In my phone I use the transflash card for wall paper, camera shots, some of my phone book and for games. The drive works great, seems to have a decent read/write access speed and I've never had a single problem with the transflash card yet.

On the 360i I can plug the phone into a standard usb port on my computer and the windows mass storage drivers in XP will identify the transflash card in the phone drive and let me move files on and off it with no extra drivers needing to be installed. So you can effectively use a cell phone equipped with a transflash drive just like a usb pen drive. If there are any other products out there using these cards I have not come across them. The size of these cards makes them a bit hard to handle and I would not put much stress on them since they are wafer thin.