Comments on: Palm OS mp3 Encoding Now Available

I agree, there's a lot of potential for an on-the-fly recorder. I wonder if your iRiver has a special chip for mp3 encoding, Voice - I can't imaging the CPU needs to be as powerful as that in the Treo.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

I wonder if your iRiver has a special chip for mp3 encoding, Voice - I can't imaging the CPU needs to be as powerful as that in the Treo.

I really doubt that. I bought a 12$, no-name, "made in China" MP3 player/recorder/FM radio that can record conversations in MP3 format. Now what super-chip could that be at this price?

Handspring Visor -> m505 -> Zire71 -> Zire72 -> Treo650

What does a "modern" 312mhz Xscale lack that a nearly decade-old 333mhz Pentium has? MMX extensions?

In my opinion the biggest hindrance to this sort of thing may be the Palm's pitiful SD card bus speeds. I could see the actual writing to the card in real-time being the source of stuttering/hiccuping.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Kris, do you have any specifics on what is the bus speed (say of a TX)? I'm going to pick up another SD card and wondered at what point I'm wasting money buying a higher speed card.

I'm still waiting for the mythical color HandEra.

No specific info per se (maybe Dmitry Grinberg or Ben Combee or even Beersy could be of further assistance?) but I do recall reading back around the T|T days that Palms have a 1-bit SD bus interface. I know for a fact that most WinMob devices & all recent digital cameras have a 4-bit interface.

Ah here it is:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=4490

While I've never run any specific speed tests, I can assure you that my Sandisk Ultra II 2gb SD card is minutely faster when writing to the card than my old blue 2gb Sandisk card was.

I'd stick with a solid name brand card and go for reliability over speed...avoid the blue Sandisks but go with an Ultra II if you do a lot of multimedia stuff (your PC's card reader can definitely utilize the extra speed if you dump a lot of mp3s & videos onto your card like I do).

For 4gb cards, I'd go with Transcend, Patriot or OCZ. I'd avoid ADATA & PQI as I've had nothing but trouble over the past 2 years with anything made by either of those companies (both flash media & DIMMs). I also read somewhere that the SD consortium are pressuring the Chinese companies to cease their SD 1.1 non-spec 4gb card output and switch over to "official" 4gb SDHC cards so you might wanna grab one while they are still readily available and cheap.

Now, to throw a twist into the whole situation:

The Register (UK) are claiming that the Treo 680 supports SDHC cards! They tested 'em!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/11/review_palm_treo_680/
(news story coming soon)

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

I also read somewhere that the SD consortium are pressuring the Chinese companies to cease their SD 1.1 non-spec 4gb card output and switch over to "official" 4gb SDHC cards....

Yep, you got that right. Here in Taiwan we are always on the "bleeding edge" (for better and worse), and it is already really hard to find an "original" (as we say in Chinese) 4gb SD card. Everything has already moved to SDHC. So I think "supply and demand" is already influencing the price: the best price I could find on a Transcend 4gb 150x card was US$125! So that's why I was wondering if I can get by just fine with a 30x card instead, whether there is really any noticeable difference in real-world usage.

Now I'm wondering if I even want a 4gb card at this point. I suspect my TX is already on its last leg, and that will leave me with my Zodiac as my main PDA (which is really not that bad of a problem to have). I believe it only accepts 2gb cards, so I'll probably just get another 2gb and have 4gb capacity on two cards together.

I'm still waiting for the mythical color HandEra.

I believe the (brilliant) iRiver iFP-799 has a dedicated Philips PNX0102 chip for MP3 playback + encoding. Probably would have cost Palm $1 to add this chip to their $600 Treos...

TVoR