Not necessarily something that we didn’t see coming but now it’s very certain that 256 GB storage options are incoming for smartphones. The reason why 2016 should be the year when we start seeing 256 GB phones on stores’ shelves is because Samsung is the company that has begun mass producing 256 GB chips. Those are based on the Universal Flash Storage 2.0 standard (UFS).

This means more than just doubling the current maximum storage that you can find on phones (128 GB). The new chips that Samsung has developed are almost twice as fast as what the current technology can provide us, clocking at a speed of 850 MB per second. The writing speed may be lower than the reading speed – at 250 MB per second – but that is quite natural and still a huge amount of transfer power if you stop to think about it.

Simultaneously though, the new chips developed by Samsung advertise themselves to support up to 45,000 IOPS (40,000 IOPS on the writing aspect), once again doubling the value of their predecessors. IOPS – also known as Input/Output Operations Per Second value – is a method of measuring and benchmarking different types of storage. All these values manage to almost catch up with the speeds of a solid state drive for computers.

This is the second major hardware improvement that smartphones are promised to be getting soon this year, the first being the addition of the new Snapdragon 820 processor series. However, while the latter has already been announced as being part of some of the upcoming flagship smartphones coming out in the following months, the storage option is not yet part of the plan in any of the announced devices. But there’s nothing stopping Samsung from adding this storage option later on throughout the first half year of the Galaxy S7’s life.

That was the method they applied to the S6 after all. While it didn’t have the 128 GB version as a purchasable option on launch, it became one later on so there’s hardly anything stopping Samsung from doing that again.

This hardware addition compliments the other plans that Samsung seems to be cooking up. In another attempt to bring more capability to smartphones and phablets alike, Samsung announced back in September that it was also working on a new dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip that could take the phone RAM value up to 6 GB of onboard memory. That number is hardly all there is to it, as the new DRAM memory is said to consume 20 percent less energy and be 30 percent faster at the same time.

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