TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

The 2gb memory card compatibility table published a few days ago was born when a major Austrian retailer started pushing 2GB memory cards out in masses. The picture below shows the dump where 2GB cards can be picked up for 19€ per piece:

The ‘Volksspeicherkarte’ offered was a product by the German brand Hama, a company I have always liked well for their affordable and yet fast memory cards. Hama shipped the memory card in a small triangular blister:

CardInfo states that the cards are produced by Toshiba – the picture below shows a ‘status dump’ from Card Info on a Treo 680:

The memory card fit well into most of my handhelds; however, getting it out of a Treo 600 was a bit hard because of the elevated markings at the back of the card.

On a Palm TX, the card performed very well speed-wise. After formatting, VfsMark reported the values given below(best of three runs):

VFSMark Results

File Create: 264%
File Delete: 747%
File Write: 15%
File Read: 552%
File Seek: 3933%
DB Export: 275%
DB Import: 197%
Record Access: 1292%
Resource Access: 1280%

VFSMark: 950

CardSpeed returned the following values:

Speed:Good
Wrt32bit: 24 bit/sec
Wrt8KB: 748982 bit/sec
Read8KB: 2016492 bit/sec

The memory card was then formatted in a Treo 680. Disasterous values were produced in both VfsMark and CardSpeed – and the Palm TX also lost about 50% of access speed:

VFSMark Results

File Create: 33%
File Delete: 20%
File Write: 13%
File Read: 682%
File Seek: 1475%
DB Export: 20%
DB Import: 316%
Record Access: 696%
Resource Access: 783%

VFSMark: 448

Speed:Poor
Wrt32bit: 21 bit/sec
Wrt8KB: 10553 bit/sec
Read8KB: 3276800 bit/sec

Formatting the card in a TX and sticking it into a Palm Treo 680 improved the Treo’s benchmark results significantly:

VFSMark Results
File Create: 278%
File Delete: 215%
File Write: 15%
File Read: 725%
File Seek: 1966%
DB Export: 302%
DB Import: 328%
Record Access: 804%
Resource Access: 960%

VFSMark: 621

Speed:Good
Wrt32bit: 23 bit/sec
Wrt8KB: 534987 bit/sec
Read8KB: 2621446 bit/sec

In everyday usage, a memory card formatted in a Palm TX(NOT in a Treo 680) is more than fast enough. Recording video onto the card is possible with a Treo 680…no lag or stuttering whatsoever.

Overall, the Hama 2GB is a solid memory card for a decet price. If you want to extend your handheld’s memory, this is an affordable and fast enough way to go.

This time we will review what Brando send us: the 55-in-1 card reader.

The card reader is a small, white box with the size 85 x 58 x 12 mm (and a weight of 40 g). The included USB cable has a length of about 60 cm. Because of all those relative small sizes, I think it is a good card reader for users of mobile computers (laptops, UMPCs,..)

Everyone should notice it – the card reader supports many different kinds of cards. There is a list of compatible cards on the product page. The only card type which is not supported is SmartMedia. I know one person which has a very old Olympus digital camera – that’s the only device I know which uses this cards. This and other manufacturers which had used SmartMedia cards now often use xD cards, the successor of SmartMedia cards. And xD cards are supported.

The support of newer card types should be much more important: CompactFlash, SD cards and Memory Sticks are standard. But the support of SDHC cards should be mentioned. SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards have sizes of 4 GB and more (4 and 8 GB cards are available) and are supported by many new PDAs (Treo 680), digital cameras and other multimedia devices; for older devices there may be a firmware upgrade for the slot driver.

It should also be mentioned that you can insert Micro SD, Mini SD, T-Flash and M2 cards directly – it needs no adapter like most other card readers.

The card reader is a regular USB 2.0 device and so can be easily connected to the most computers. It acts as a USB mass storage device which is supported by the most operating systems, including Windows 2000, ME, XP and Mac OS (officially supported by Brando), Windows CE, Linux and others. I tried it at both an older Windows XP USB 1.1 computer and a Mandriva 2007 laptop and couldn’t find any problems.

I can confirm the compatibility of the following cards. None of the cards I own made any problems:

• 16 MB SD, Canon
• 256 MB SD, SanDisk
• 128 MB Memory Stick, Iodata
• 1024 MB SD, Panasonic (Highspeed)
• 128 MB Compact Flash, Lexar Media

Because of USB 2.0, data transfers are very fast. I wrote some files and copied many pictures from a SD card. The speed should only depend on the cards you use. I could even insert three cards at one time, and it worked well. An LED shows when a card is inserted / accessed:

In my opinion, every Palm user who owns an SD card should have a card reader. Although many new computers contain a card reader, there are few ones that read so many different card types and even SDHC cards. This card reader is useful for anyone who has a PDA, digital camera, MP3 player or other device which uses flash cards, because you can insert (almost?) all card types – I think Smart Media support is not too important. You can’t do much wrong if you buy this card reader – it is in the Brando Shop for $ 28.00.

I recently hang out at a Burger King with a friend of mine, and we were bored. So, we decided to test which Palm accesses VFS memory the fastest.

We had a Palm Tungsten T3, a Palm Tungsten E2 and a Palm Tungsten T5. The card used was a SimpleTech/HP 1GB SD card, and the benchmark program used was VFSMark(the standard – the numbers don’t mean anything but everyone publishes them ). We ran each benchmark twice and then averaged the results.

Anyways, to cut a long story short – the Palm Tungsten T5 is the fastest, with the Palm Tungsten T3 second and the Palm Tungsten E2 being third.

The Palm Tungsten T3 and the Palm Tungsten T5 were more-less on par when reading data was concerned, the E2 was already lagging behind seriously in this discipline. When writing was concerned, the Palm Tungsten T5 overtook both Palm Tungsten T3 and Palm Tungsten E2 significantly. The Palm Tungsten T3 usually was a bit faster than the low-end Palm Tungsten E2 though!

A gif graph(17k, but big) of the results can be downloaded here. The full Excel spreadsheet containing all the data can be downloaded here.

What do you think?

According to this thread on 1src, the PalmTX supports SD cards with 8 GB capacity.

The Tungsten E2 was the last PalmOne device with FAT16 drivers. The next one, LifeDrive had a 4 GB hard disk, and due limitations of FAT16 (no partitions > 2 GB), a new driver had to be developed. From then on, all PalmOne devices (except the Z22) had the FAT32 driver which supports – according to Wikipedia – much more than 8 GB. However, not every device could handle cards with “maximum size” (the Tungsten C doesn’t recognize 2 GB cards, the Tungsten T3 has read-only access, …). Because of this you first have to test if such a card works.

To fill a 8 GB card, you need lots of data, for example:

• 20 movies with appr. 90 minutes in handheld quality (each ~ 200 MB)
• 7000 JPG photos with 3 MP (2048×1536) (each ~ 0.8 – 1.2 MB)
• 2000 MP3 music files in good quality (each ~ 4 MB)
• 80 backup sets of a full TX memory (each 100 MB)

or

• 5 movies (see above for exact specifications), 3000 pictues, Wikipedia with text and images, 500 MP3 music files, 200 MB Palm database stuff in /Palm/Launcher, 5 backup sets of a full TX memory and still 120 MB free )

That sounds good – but what costs such a fun? A 1 GB SD card starts from 50 EUR, a 2 GB one from 110 EUR and a 4 GB one 270 EUR. And a 8 GB one? Froogle only finds CompactFlash cards with 8 GB, they cost appr. 600 EUR. A LifeDrive is cheaper…

What do you think?