SanDisk has announced a new iNAND solution this week, the 7232. Generally, we don’t cover advances in the type of NAND flash used in smartphones — it doesn’t tend to drive a lot of exciting press, since the performance is lower and the capacities much smaller, but this news warrants a special mention. SanDisk’s new iNAND 7232 is mostly an evolution of its previous system, but it’s shipping in quantities of 32GB – 128GB. The previous generation, iNAND 7132, shipped in 16GB minimum capacities.

Why is that important? Because it could mean that 16GB phones may go the way of the dodo in the not-too-distant future.

It’s funny how one’s perspective on this issue changes. Back when I owned an 8GB iPhone 4S, I didn’t think the 8GB of storage on the device was overly small. Flash-forward to the present day, however, and larger app installs, OS foot-prints, and my own pack-rattedness have combined to take their toll — I’m constantly bumping into size limitations on a 16GB device, despite not running many applications. The iPhone 6 stuck with this 16GB minimum, despite widespread dissatisfaction.

Apple isn’t the only company that continues to ship a 16GB minimum size, but it’s easily the most prominent manufacturer. Smartphone companies have resisted shifting to higher capacities because they make an absolute killing on NAND flash. Higher tiers of storage typically cost between $50 – $100, despite costing the manufacturer $5-10 at most. Pay for a $200 premium, and you’ve just handed your smartphone manufacturer 90% profit on the upgrade.

SanDisk’s iNAND 7232 uses the same performance-boosting tactics as its previous family. Like some modern SSDs, it splits the NAND flash into two areas — a high-performance SLC cache that can burst up to 280MB/s read and 150MB/s write, and a TLC NAND partition that stores the bulk of the actual data. SanDisk is also claiming the chips can support gigabit wireless performance, including feeding 802.11ac in a 2×2 antenna configuration. These advances in burst performance are delivered courtesy of the NAND partitioning shown above; such partition schemes are invisible to the end user and don’t eat additional storage capacity in and of themselves. The long-term wear issues that have been associated with TLC NAND in the past don’t seem to be an issue for smartphones, since most people don’t spend a lot of time writing huge amounts of data to their mobile devices.

A bit of additional top-end performance would be nice, but since even the highest-end smartphones rarely push the envelope in terms of NAND flash performance, it’s not the major selling point. 32GB as the default size for modern devices? We’ll take that, hands down.