Phones and cameras with a really powerful Flash

I apologise up front – despite trying to keep technical matters away from this blog, I felt this article was worth posting because it explains so clearly and abundantly a technology that you almost certainly carry in your pocket on a regular basis.

Most of us are familiar with cut-open images showing the spinning platters in hard disks that store our data at home and in our data centres. Every time we put on a film in our living room, we feel at home with the notion of little optical knobbles that reflect blinding laser light and are often used to back up our personal data.

But, when you snap your friends at the party with your digital camera, or listen to music on your phone, how much do you actually understand the vast differences in the way that those tiny plastic flash memory cards work, and how much they will begin to encroach on other types of storage?