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 US$ 100/€ 100/£ 100,
seeing how the current 256 GB NM card is between US$ 50 and US$ 80 at Vmall, Amazon,
and some offline stores.
