Alongside the slate of new phones Huawei announced today was an interesting addition: a new type of expandable storage the company is calling Nano Memory (NM), which replaces the traditional microSD card in the newly announced Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro.
 
Huawei says that NM cards, which are identical in size and shape to a Nano SIM card, are 45 percent smaller than a microSD card, and come in at least a 256GB storage and 90MB/s transfer speed version that the company showed off onstage.
 
On the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, the NM Card goes in one of the slots on the dual-SIM tray, with users having to choose between extra storage or a second SIM card.
 
As of now, it seems that the NM Card is exclusive to Huawei, both in terms of phones that support the memory cards and storage companies manufacturing them (apropos of nothing: remember Sony’s Memory Sticks?) Things will be far more interesting if NM Cards expand out to other companies as a new standard for storage — especially as dual-SIM phones are becoming increasingly popular to appeal to international markets (even Apple makes a dual-SIM iPhone for China now.)
 
For now, though, we’re still waiting to hear from Huawei about basic things like price and availability for the NM Cards it announced today, let alone the company’s plans for possibly introducing a new industry storage format standard.