Comments on: An Introduction to NVFS Flash Memory

If it crashes and burns I guess I can just start splitting my larger city maps up.

JLM.

Nope. It's just win - for Palm. Palm appears to be charging an extra $50 - $100 for this "feature". For $50 you could get a much bigger SD card - and never lose your backed up data in case of a hard reset.
Palm just got greedy and is trying to charge premium prices for a feature that really costs them peanuts to implement. I guess that's how things work in the cynical new "Palm Economy"...

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

A $20 SD card and a $10 copy of BackupMan would be a better solution for most people. That way you never lose the data - even if the Palm has a hard reset.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

So, T3@ $350 + ~$50 for a 512mb SD =$400 + tax. You get a cradle, voice recorder etc too in that bundle.

OR

you can spend $450 for a T5 & cradle and have LESS storage space and an inherently buggier, less elegant handheld.

I paid $300 for my last T3. I then snagged a 512mb SD and a 256mb USB flash drive. I have far, far greater functionality than a T5 with oodles more storage space. And I find a keychain drive easier to carry than the T5's proprietary USB cable.

(For what it's worth, drive mode would at least make partial sense on a mini-USB equipped Palm that had a large SD card inserted into it).

-NAND flash is relatively cheap. NOR flash is more expensive, but supports XIP (execute-in-place), which is what Palms have historically always done. So leaping to supporting NAND flash opens the door to potentially cheaper, larger storage under the covers. This is a good thing. If you look at how much memory is in the T5, they aren't ridiculously overcharging you for the memory you get, if it were NOR flash, the price would be much higher.

-HOWEVER, the way this is implemented in the T5 and the Treo 650 is more than a little bogus. The explanation in the link is mostly correct, if a little incomplete; there's a 10 meg DB cache on the T5 which gets filled whenever you run an application or open a database (they're functionally the same thing). It is equivalent to loading an app from your hard drive into RAM, with a similar performance penalty. But this completely changes the way you write some applications, including the one I'm currently working on. Just _opening_ a DB causes it to be loaded into the cache, whereas with older Palms no movement takes place whatsoever. For any apps with largish DBs, this creates a perceptible slowdown, which we Palm people aren't used to. Worse, there is a significant weirdness with DBs that have very small records; the OS apparently pads small records to make them easier to manipulate in chunks in and out of NAND flash. This is not cool at all; in one bad case, one of my DBs ballooned from 2 meg to 14 meg because of this padding. And there's nothing you can do about it, as far as I can tell.

So in short, it all depends on the kinds of apps you want to run, but this is a pretty significant change, and is not a universally good thing. Think of it as bolting an SD card onto your Palm under the covers, and forcing your main storage to mirror it. Your storage gets cheaper and bigger, but slower too.

So in short, it all depends on the kinds of apps you want to run, but this is a pretty significant change, and is not a universally good thing... Your storage gets cheaper and bigger, but slower too.

I think NAND Flash is a big step backward and provides essentially no significant advantages in these days of ultra-cheap SD cards. When you add the fact that Palm decided to gouge consumers for the "privilege" of having an internal, reset-vulnerable 160 MB SD card, (they're using the T"5" memory as a major reason for it being "worth" $400), any arguments in favor of NAND Flash seem rather weak. In my opinion, Tapwave's solution of 128 MB of "real" RAM + dual SD is vastly superior use of memory. And money. It's a shame to see functionality again limited by the desire to pinch pennies.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

Give us regular RAM + two SD slots, Palm. Enough with the gimmicks. It's time for Palm to regroup and focus all its dwindling resources on fixing the flaws in the current lineup.

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=7308

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.