Most high-end smartphones rarely offer more than 128GB of onboard storage. The iPhone 6 maxes out at 128GB and so does the Galaxy S6. The problem is that while everybody likes more storage some one of them are just not willing or able to pay top dollar for a top-of-the-line flagship smartphone. Samsung sees an opportunity here which it's going to plug with its new high-performance mobile memory storage based on eMMC 5.0 technology. The 128GB 3-bit NAND-based chip is primarily targeted at “mass market” smartphones and tablets. That's just a fancy way of saying that this chip is meant for affordable mobile devices.
Flagships like the Galaxy S6 have already moved on to the faster Universal Flash Storage or UFS 2.0 standard. This means that mid-market smartphones and tablets can now have increased storage capacity as the gap is there. They can get more capacity courtesy of Samsung's new eMMC 5.0 chip. Samsung calls it the “industry's highest density eMMC 5.0 solution.” The new 128GB chip is capable of sequential data reading at up to 260 MB/s. For random read and write operations it can handle up to 6,000 IOPS and 5,000 IOPS respectively.
The only thing Samsung didn't mention in today's press release is when it will start mass producing this new chip. Once it starts shipping the chips to OEMs we will start seeing devices in the mid-range market offer up to 128GB onboard storage. Don't be surprised if Samsung uses this for some of its own mid-range smartphones and tablets.
