CES 2015: Toshiba announces the world's first SDHC card with built-in NFC and FlashAir III wireless cards

Toshiba has made some interesting announcements at this year’s CES, the latest being an  SHDC card with built-in NFC (Near Field Communication) which lets you view thumbnails of the images and check the storage space on the card. Toshiba claims that this is a world first.

Toshiba has launched three cards across capacities of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB and these cards will start selling from February onwards. Instead of putting the card in your card reader to transfer images, you can get your NFC-enabled mobile phone close to the card. You will need a companion app called Memory Card Preview, which lets you see thumbnails of 16 images and check for available storage. Unfortunately, that is all you can do with the card. There is no provision for image transfer.

It seems a bit handicapped considering it just gives you a preview of 16 images and storage space available, two things which seem quite redundant as you already can preview images on your camera itself and the number of images which can be shot, is always indicated numerically on your camera display. Also these are Class 10 UHS cards, which is not the best in terms of speeds. Pricing details for these cards weren’t out.

Toshiba also announced its third generation of FlashAir III wireless SD cards at CES, which lets the card act as its own wireless LAN access point for sharing images to smartphones, tablets and laptops. These cards seem more useful than the SDHC cards with in-built NFC.

The FlashAir III SD cards are expected to come in capacities such as 16GB priced at $80 or approx Rs 5,100 and 32GB priced at $100 or approx Rs 6.350. Just like the NFC based cards, the FlashAir III  cards are also come with Class 10 rating.

Toshiba offers a FlashAir Mobile app for iOS and Android-based devices for image transfer. The FlashAir III cards come with a 5-year warranty period.