SanDisk has a very wide range of microSD cards hitting every possible taste in speeds. Its new U3 Extreme Plus microSDXC card ($199.99) offers excellent performance at a price just a little higher than competing cards, but we still think it's tracking ahead of the applications you'd actually use it for.

Memory cards are used to pump up the storage in many phones and tablets. They're also the default memory cards for action cameras like the GoPro line, and with readers or adapters, can be used in other digital cameras and as removable memory for PCs. Right now, 64GB is the largest mainstream size for these chips; while we're starting to see 128GB cards, they cost a real premium.

SanDisk's Extreme Plus and Extreme Pro cards are the first cards we've seen with a UHS Class 3 speed rating. According to the SD Card Association, that means they're capable of 4K video. For this card, SanDisk claims up to 80MBps read speed and 50MBps write speed.

To test microSD cards, we ran the A1 SD Card benchmark on a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, copied files to and from a MacBook Pro using the built-in SD card reader, and ran the CrystalDiskMark benchmark on a Cyberpower PC with the cards plugged into a USB 3.0 reader.

The Extreme Plus offers better performance than the SanDisk Mobile Extreme, but at these levels, we're not seeing the huge jumps in performance that we did with previous generations of cards. For one thing, the Galaxy Note 3 seems to max out at Extreme levels of performance—and remember, this is a phone that records 4K video at 30 frames per second. But even in the PCs, we're seeing incremental steps rather than the huge leaps in write speeds we saw, say, between the Mobile Ultra and Mobile Extreme. That makes me hesitant to recommend this more expensive card over the Mobile Extreme.

SanDisk needs to get over its habit of assigning comically meaningless list prices. This card lists at $199.99, but started selling for $74.99 at Amazon the same week it launched. That said, it's competing with a lot of cards in the $50 to $60 range.

Yes, the Extreme Plus has better performance than the Editors' Choice SanDisk Mobile Extreme, but we're leaving the award where it lies. Until mobile phones and tablets start taking advantage of the bleeding-edge performance of SanDisk's Plus and Pro cards, the Mobile Extreme is the best choice for mobile phone and tablet users.