MoCo News tells the tale on growing use of removable memory in mobile phones, based on data from NPD Group. The number of phones shipping with removable memory jumped over 250% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006, according to NPD numbers.

The most popular format is MicroSD, according to the researchers.

This data makes sense as consumers seek not neccesarily to converge all functions in one device, but have multiple devices work together, and the use of memory cards across multiple devices is one way of doing that. Also, limited storage sizes in handsets are driving the demand for swappable storage in order to get more images, songs, applications and the like on a smaller device.