MMCmicro is a new memory card format developed by Samsung Electronics and aimed at use in cell phones. It offers both a small size and low power consumption, both of which are important in handset design because of limited space and limited battery life.

The card will likely compete with Transflash, which was developed by Sandisk Corp. and is most of the way to being adopted by the SD Card Association as the MicroSD format.

The Samsung cards measure 12 millimeters (mm) by 14 mm by 1.1 mm and can read data at 10M bps (bits per second) and write data at 7M bps.

Samsung will make available cards in 32M byte, 64M byte, 128M byte and 256M byte capacities. A 512M-byte card is promised within three months and Samsung has plans for a 2G-byte card in the first half of 2006, it said.