The first Memory Stick card was introduced in 1998 by Sony Corporation mostly to be used by digital cameras and other electronic devices manufactured by Sony. The limitations of the purple coloured Memory Stick in storage capacity, max 128 MB, and transfer speed, 2.45 MB/sec, contributed to the introduction of the Memory Stick PRO.

Sony Corporation, in cooperation with SanDisk Corporation, introduced in 2003 the Memory Stick PRO platform. It has the same physical format, about the stick of gum, as the standard Memory Stick card but offers higher storage capacity and higher transfer speed. Memory Stick and Memory Stick PRO are manufactured only by Sony, SanDisk and Lexar. The standard Memory Stick can always be used in a Memory Stick PRO slot and in most of the cases a PRO card can be used in a standard Memory Stick slot. We recommend you to look in the product’s manual for finding out if a Memory Stick PRO can be used in your product’s Memory Stick slot. However you will not be able to utilise the higher transfer speed that the Memory Stick PRO has to offer when using it on a standard Memory Stick slot. In cases like that the PRO card will have the same transfer speed as a standard Memory Stick.

The Memory Stick Select was introduced for solving the limitation of the standard Memory Stick’s storage capacity, 128 MB. Memory Stick Select is in reality using two standard Memory Stick chips in the same memory card. This move allowed the Memory Stick Select to double the maximum storage capacity to 256 MB.