16GB memory cards most popular, say vendors

For most of us, our smartphones today also double up as entertainment units. While phones these days come with a reasonable amount of memory capacity, it just seems like it’s never enough. That’s where the memory card comes in. If you have a lot of media on your smartphone like videos, music files and even images, or you’re a mobile camera buff who loves snapping pictures often, then you need the extra storage space. Today’s standard is the MicroSD card that’s available in an array of capacities starting from 2GB up to 64GB. But what are people buying these days? We were curious to see just what capacity was most popular amongst the general public, so we did a little research and here’s what we found out.

There’s a demand for 16GB cards

While snooping around, we discovered that even though you now have memory cards going up to 64GB, there aren’t many takers for this capacity. Among the higher capacity memory card, 16GB seems to be the popular choice followed by 32GB. Given that today, for most part, newer smartphones tend to feature inbuilt memory of 4GB to 8GB, and even 16GB and 32GB for higher end models, people prefer either a 16GB or 32GB, especially if they already have 8GB of built-in memory. Those with 16GB built-in memory on their phone may not feel the urge to top-up the memory though, as that capacity is enough to satisfy the needs of most.

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Even while this is true, there seemed to be quite a few takers for the 32GB cards as well. We also noticed another trend – the 2GB memory cards seemed to be fading away and becoming decreasingly popular. Retailers informed us that even the 4GB memory cards are slowly becoming redundant and not many vendors stock them anymore. We took our search to the online domain and found a similar pattern. We hunted around for 2GB and 4GB cards and found only a few listings here and there.

We spoke to a few more vendors and discovered that when buying memory cards, people aren’t quite concerned about the brand. As long as the cost was reasonable, it didn’t matter what the company was. However, what they do tend to query about is a warranty. Features like write speed, ruggedness, shock proof/water proof capabilities etc. are not something that people have asked too much about. The bottom line was simply price and warranty.

While there are many brands selling memory cards – Transcend, Kingston, SanDisk, Strontium, Verbatim, Amkette and more– amongst these, Transcend and SanDisk are more popularly known. Nevertheless, we found that most vendors seem to stock only Transcend. They reasoned that it was the most popular choice as people seemed to prefer it over others.

The Transcend memory cards that were in stock with the vendors ranged from Rs. 200 for 4GB to Rs. 3,800 for 64GB. The best-sellers – 16GB was priced at Rs. 600 and 32GB was priced at Rs. 1300. The prices are approximate based on information received from vendors we spoke to. The online and offline prices don’t seem to vary much, with a difference of about fifty to hundred rupees.

Note: Avoid purchasing memory cards and pen drives from street vendors as they could simply be dummy pieces that you won’t be able to figure out before actually using them.