Samsung said Monday it has developed the industry's first eight-gigabyte flash memory card for mobile handsets.

The "moviNAND" can store and process data twice as fast as existing four-gigbyte memory cards, the South Korean firm said in a statement.

Its mass-production is due in the year's secound quater, Samsung said.

The new card can memorize the equivalant of to 2,000 songs or map data big enough to run a global positioning system but it is up to 20 percent smaller than its industry peers, it said.

Samsung said the new memory card would help make mobile handsets even smaller because it is a built-in type which requires no external card slot.

The global market for moviNAND cards is expected to grow to up to four billion dollars by 2010, Samsung added.