Quickies: 1GB SD, Weblink, Monsta, LAPUG, PalmGSM & More

Sony mentioned back in the summer that they *hoped* to have them available by the end of '02...

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.asp?ID=3582

I don't want the white colour one. I want the blue one.

____
Nothing to kill or die for.

That's the first thing I thought when I saw that 1GB SD are available. Where are the larger than 128MB MS? It's obvious that it isn't because of physical limitations because an SD card is even smaller than an MS card.

In reply to hkklife:
Most PalmOS devices have such a slow bus that you can hardly see any benefit between MMC and SD (should be 4x faster).
You won't see any difference using the even faster 1 GB SD.

The controller is on the SD card, so no problems there. For SmartMedia, the controller is on the device. So if
your device is not set up for larger size, it can't use larger SM.

PalmOS 4.0 could only handle 64 MB SD. Palm put out a patch and OS4.1 update to address that. I forget how big
OS4.1 can handle.

I'm also curious about the speed differences. My 128Mb Toshiba tested at a final score of 85% with VFSmark, but at the time I assumed that it was due to the benchmark being a 16Mb card instead of 128Mb. It did score 116% on file read though.

I'll have to run some comparison tests when I get home using the 64Mb card from my wife's device and a friend's 16Mb card.

Quick question while we are on cards: A good friend is interested in buying my 128Mb card for his iPaq, but the device would not recognize the card. I can format the card in my PC or my Palm, and it works fine in both (can even run defrag), but not his iPaq. There are native Windows files on the card in addition to Palm-only files. Does PPC require the SD card to be formatted on a PPC before it will work? I'm having dinner with him Sunday, so maybe I'll backup my card and let him try it...

I have used/interchanged a variety of SD cards between my Palm and my old Panasonic iPalm digicam. I just got the new Minolta F100 the other day (great camera, btw) and it's worked with a Sandisk 128 mb card (newer non-buggy rev.), a Sandisk 64, a Toshiba 16 meg and a Panasonic 16 meg. I have even taken an SD Card with some Palm files alread on it, shot a few pics with the Panasonic, and then moved the card into the Minolta and shot a few more pics. All 3 units had no problems read/writing to the card and the Minolta's playback mode even showed the pics taken by the Panasonic. Nice.
The Palm, using the latest version of the bundled Photosuite Photoview program, was able to view the images taken by the cameras with no problems either.

On a side note, the Minolta did seem to be slower writing files to a card formatted in the Palm than to the same card after it had been formatted within the camera.

My buddy with a Sony handheld and digicam also says that the camera is slower when using a card shared with his NR70. Hmmm.

Does anyone know if the bus speeds on the OS5 Palms will be increased so as to be able to take advantage of the larger/faster cards?

I was researching the issue as I am getting ready to jump ship (confession time) if Tungsten turns out to be Sony-like low battery life etc to Toshiba. I wondered whether the SD card would be faster...

It has something to do with (not too sure what the techy word is) bits, The M505 has a 1 bit sthg to read its SD card (which makes it even slower than a CF card, which is why I now realise my Psion 5MX was faster than my Palm!) anyway the new IPAQs and e740 use 4 bits worth of whatever it is called to access the SD card which has a potential trnasfer speed of 10MB/s. So to the original question, can the M505/515 utilise the super speed super capacity card: no from a speed point of view.

Now just as a caveat, in case a thousand replies follow like bees to honey, I am not a techy and am glad to be corrected.

There is a saying in Persian:

"Neem hakeem khatray jaan"

"Being half a doctor is danger to life"

I hope the above answer doesn't fall into the half baked.

Taqi

1GB. How can anybody find enough stuff to fill it?

-------------
Burning Desire: The want or need for something great.
Burning THE Zire: A fun recreational activity involving setting Palm's new crappy handheld ablaze.

CHrist! My laptop(my main PC), is 20GB and i have only filled like half of that. And it is full of crap.
Imagine if you lost the 16GB card! Well, there goes $5000!

But i would imagine that prices go down as the capacities get higher.

If you really need that much memory, surely a external mini hard drive is much more cost effective...
Maybe a clip on sled? That would be dirt cheap compared to those tiny weany cards.

Oh well, in 20 years time we'll be scoffing at 16GB, because our brand new OS76 will be loaded up with 16 tetrabytes. God bless computers ;)

Several Months Ago at Palm Headquarters;

"Hah! Those sony bastards think that they can beat us in stupid names. The Tungsten T is infinitely more ridiculous than "clie"....."

This is how i'd fill up a 1GB memory stick, or a 16GB whatever card: my mp3 collection.

nuff said

"[note: the SD card association www.sdcard.org won't provide specs unless you're a member (at $1500 / year!) so the details aren't easy to come by. Contrast to www.memorystick.org]"

It's $1000 a year, and it contrasts quite nicely to Sony's $4000+ a year license fees.

> the last time I looked at www.sdcard.org/join.htm it showed
> "General" membership at $1500/yr and "Executive" at $4k/yr.

"Membership" has to do with being a member of the association, going to meetings, being able to provide input on the spec and its future, general upkeep of the association, and all the related hoopla. There is no equivalent on the Memory Stick side of things, since Memory Stick is Sony proprietary.

If you want to make SD cards, there is a $1000/year license fee. For Memory Stick it is something like $4000/year, Magic Gate cards have a different license fee plus royalties.

Here are some "free" specs if that makes you happy.
http://www.sdcard.org/sdphysical_simplifyed_Ver101.PDF

Craig,

Thanks for clarifying that and particularly for providing the link to the simplified physical layer spec. Having that info *does* make me happy! :)

FWIW, I wasn't attempting to imply that one external memory format was superior to another, just voicing my disappointment that I couldn't find any publicly-available specs at sdcard.org -- I certainly wasn't attempting to antagonize you!

Peace.

- Dan

Like the user above, I carry a lot of books with me. I like to be able to use the Palm for reference in meetings.

I would think that the 16GB option would be useful for inventory databases - like in a grocery store. Add an SD barcode reader or barcode scanning sled and you could cross-reference the UPC, weight, prices, etc of every item in the store, as well as store the inventory you are taking - maybe even a couple of them which could then be compared.

Granted, the WiFi barcode scanners they have now, linking to a back-end database server elsewhere in the store (such as they use now) is probably a better solution, and more practical. But it IS one example of why to bother with a 16GB card.

Ick

"Most PalmOS devices have such a slow bus that you can hardly see any benefit between MMC and SD (should be 4x faster)."

I beg to differ based on experience. The Palm data bus is too slow to take advantage of the full transfer speeds, but there is a drastic speed difference between SD and MMC anyways. I currently have a 16Mb Palm SD, 64Mb SanDisk SD, and a 128Mb Toshiba SD. The 32Mb MMC was was two to three times slower... when launching an app from the MMC card for the first time, I thought the the device had hung as I waited about 10 seconds for an app that usually opens from an SD card in 3. It was cheap, but so much slower that I returned it to the store.

It is fun. I've been playing a beta version :)

You know, Palm is hardly the only company that can use SD cards, and really, this is more for devices like the Tungsten that can actually use it. No, it's not made for some m130 user filling it with a couple dozen hours of 12-bit 160x160 video, it's for the future.

-Davy Fields
http://nr70.davyfields.com

And i forgot, cameras...

Media-type people would use this type of capacities.
Video cameras? I'm not sure how digital videos work....

Several Months Ago at Palm Headquarters;

"Hah! Those sony bastards think that they can beat us in stupid names. The Tungsten T is infinitely more ridiculous than "clie"....."

I don't know what I would put on a card that would occupy 1G except for media. My relational databases only take up less than 1Mb each. The big space hog is media, with some files being 5Mb to 20Mb.

What use is video on a 5xx series? Depends if you have a real purpose to video, or if you just want to show off to your friends. For me, it's mostly entertainment like movies I don't have time to watch at home, or a late night stop at a drivethrough (I put it in the gps holder on my dash for the kids to watch). My wife has a more legitimate use when she vists hospitals or prisons, as she can show videos of the kids or relatives of that person. Another use is for her dance videos. If there is a question about a move, she can just pull out her Palm and watch how they did it at the last rehearsal. Of course the audio is the worst point, but it seems to improve with use. The video image is better than you would assume. Most persons have a mental picture how it would look like on whatever device, like two blotches sliding across the screen, but persons that actually see a properly encoded clip are surprised at how good it looks.

"How would you go about "properly" encoding a file vs. improperly?"

When encoding a video, you have to balance between quality, size, and performance. A video clip can be encoded for minimum quality to obtain smaller file size and reduce performance requirements. And we sometimes skimp on the quality when we don't need to do so.

The resulting clip is not really "improper" or wrong, unless you are going use it as a basis for judging a handheld. A clip encoded at 560Kbps will look better than a clip encoded at 320Kbps, even if they are on the same device. Now, taking the low quality clip, putting on a standard res device, and showing it to someone who expects mediocre results will give them what they are expecting, especially if they have already seen a good quality clip on a device with a great screen (Nr/Nx70).

However, if you want better quality, this is not the encoding scheme you would use. The 505 and 515 can play multimedia at 720Kbps and 15Fps with no problems, so the hardware is capable of better than the default settings in Kinoma Player. The results when you up the bitrate, in most cases, are better than expected, and even owners of devices with much better screens are quite surprised.