Apparently "Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, and others" are developing a new flash memory card standard they hope will replace the now-common SD card standard. The good news: it should be faster and require less power than current memory cards. The bad news: yet another memory card standard out there.

We already have MMC, SD, miniSD, microSD, Compact Flash, xD, Sony's whateverStick, and so on and so on. I'm happy these days that I can put everything on a microSD and then use adapters for basically any smartphone I would want to use. If this UFS is to be the new standard, let's hope that the consortium gets everybody on board, because I smell a BluRay vs HDDVD kind of situation in the offing and it doesn't smell good.

The goal of the new specification, dubbed Universal Flash Storage (UFS), is memory cards with high-speed access to large multimedia files, while at the same time reducing power-consumption. The target performance level is a significant advancement beyond that of the varied flash cards popular today. Under the new standard, a 90-minute movie that that takes up 4 GB on a memory card will be loaded in seconds.

Read: Mobile Phone Makers Developing Another Memory Card Standard