The capacity of flash units has been ballooning the past few years. This probably has a lot to do with the increased popularity of portable media players that don't rely on internal hard drives, like the iPod, and PDAs. Naturally, as data density increases, performance tends to go hand in hand with it. Now, Microdia is getting ready to release what will most likely be the first 16GB SDHC flash cards. The units are aimed at giving outstanding performance at a not-so-outstanding price, with a retail 16GB unit going for $3500. Can that be right? It surely can, but probably not for very long - other vendors have 16GB SDHC cards in the works as well.

These units are expected in May. A year from now, having a phone with 16GB of internal storage on a tiny SDHC card will probably be nothing special - and I look forward to this.