Now SD cards will come built-in; and why wasn't this done years ago?

I’ve always kind of wondered why more phones and media players didn’t have more built-in storage. SD is cheap, and fast enough for most low-demand data uses — mp3s, small videos, any kind of office doc — yet while my phone has a MicroSD slot, I believe its internal storage (the default for pictures, music and so on) is a whopping 16 megabytes. You’d think they’d at least have updated with the times as successive generations of easy storage got cheaper.

Well, I guess someone finally asked the right person, because the SD Card Association is announcing embedded SD functionality, something which seems like it would have been a no-brainer back in 2000. For whatever reason, it’s happening now, so you can expect storage in low-end phones to jump. Am I missing something here? All it would take to embed SD would be a controller and an interface hard-wired to a decapitated SD card. I’m guessing the capabilities have been there for years but there were licensing agreements or some such.