SanDisk at Mobile World Congress is kickstarting its iNAND embedded flash drive with a new 16GB model. Designed primarily for smartphones, media players, and other very space-limited handhelds, the new drive doubles the storage of the earlier model without taking up extra space. As a result, even slim phones and other devices can carry the new capacity, SanDisk says. Currently, most handsets such as the iPhone rely on more traditional flash memory chips that often consume more space.

The technology should also scale to work for future devices that can boot entirely from the iNAND drive rather than a separate memory chip. SanDisk plans to sample these 16GB drives beginning in spring of this year, with cellphone manufacturers shipping products shortly afterwards. A higher-capacity 32GB version is already slated for an introduction in the second half of the year, though whether sampling or mass production will start before the end of 2008 is unclear.