It was one of the smallest and thinnest of the early memory cards, only 0.76 mm thick, and managed to maintain a favorable cost ratio as compared to the others.

This feature later caused problems, since some older devices would require firmware updates to handle larger capacity cards.

The lack of built-in controller also made it impossible for the card to perform automatic wear levelling, a process which prevents premature failure of any individual block by ensuring that write operations are evenly distributed across the whole device.

This method was not without its own disadvantages, as it required special drivers offering only very basic file read/write capability (or read-only on Macintosh systems) and was limited to floppy-disk transfer speeds.

However, this was not so troublesome in the earlier days of the format, when card sizes were limited (generally 8–16 MB), and USB interfaces were both uncommon and low-speed, with digital cameras connecting by "high-speed" serial links that themselves needed drivers and special transfer programs.

The 15 minutes taken to read a nearly full 16 MB card directly to hard disk by Flashpath using the slowest (128 kbit/s) PC floppy controller was still simpler and slightly faster than the quickest reliable (115.2 kbit/s) serial link, without the need for connection, synching and thumbnail previewing, and only beaten by expensive parallel-port-based external card readers that could do the same job in 2 minutes or less (≳1000 kbit/s, comparable to USB 1.0) when connected to a compatible high-speed ECP or EPP port (and ~5 minutes using a basic PPT in failsafe mode).

Typically, SmartMedia cards were used as storage for portable devices, in a form that could easily be removed for access by a PC.

It was backed especially by Fujifilm and Olympus,[citation needed] though the format started to exhibit problems, as camera resolutions increased.

[citation needed] It did not find as much support in PDAs, MP3 players, or pagers as some other formats, especially in North America and Europe, though there was still significant use.

Samsung's 1999 Yepp Hip-Hop MP3 player also used the feature in order to implement Secure Digital Music Initiative DRM.

A SmartMedia card, and the FlashPath adapter, is used as a plot device in the film Colombiana (2011), during the opening scenes set in the mid-1990s.