Lexar launches 512 GB NM card for Huawei phones
Huawei introduced a proprietary memory card format called NM card back in October 2018 and has been using it on most devices for the past five years. The standard saw no adoption outside the Chine maker's own devices and understandably memory makers didn't exactly rush to embrace it.
Yet now that Huawei sales are apparently picking up again Lexar is hopping on board. So far the largest available NM card was 256 GB, but the company now launched a new NM card with 512 GB capacity.
The NM card is one-third smaller than the micro SD card and fits in the nano-SIM slot. The reason why other companies haven't adopted this standard is the more complex design and technical difficulties, which would increase costs.
There's also the marketing part where smartphone companies prefer users to stay in their ecosystem and use the in-house cloud storage like Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Samsung Cloud, Mi Cloud, etc.
The new Lexar product supports eMMC 5.1 protocol and offers a reading speed of 90 MB/s and a writing speed of up to 85 MB/s, which are not nearly as fast as current built-in storage, but more than enough for shooting 4K video on a Huawei smartphone.
The 512 GB NM card is yet to appear for sale online. We expect a price tag of well over $100/â¬100/£100, seeing how the current 256 GB NM card is between $50 and $80 at Vmall, Amazon, and some offline stores.