Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Memory Card Rant
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:00 PM
"All recently-made PDAs ship with some horribly anemic amount of built-in RAM that's used for application storage (and in some really confusing cases, also for application heap at runtime). They then include some sort of memory expansion slot to address this shortcoming. However, you must obey the first commandment of PDA memory expansion: Thou shalt not install applications on the memory card. This has failed dismally on every modern PDA I've used, regardless of platform.
...On the PocketPC: Not so much a problem installing apps to the memory card, but some would just fail on launch. Again, you're never quite sure whether it will work or not. I'm told, although this wasn't a problem on my e740, that some PocketPC models which include both Compact Flash and SD expansion slots would name both of them "Storage Card". Thus, the app would store a bunch of references to, say, "Storage Card" the Compact Flash, and then go looking for its files on "Storage Card" the SD card and fail the next time you launched it."
The above rant is found on stevenf.com, an unlikely site for a well-considered rant on the issue of storage cards and PDAs. For the most part, I'd have to agree with his conclusion. I find that most of my apps work when installed on a storage card, but not all do, and it's hard to know which ones will work before you install them. And let's not forget the "internal memory card": the Flash ROM. That's even worse! Some of my favourite programs don't function when installed to Flash ROM, which is frustrating. I never owned a Newton, but the idea of having a program be a single file is quite appealing.
I wonder why it's still so difficult to have programs work consistently from storage cards? Part of the fault lies with the developers, but also with Microsoft - the storage card naming issue is something they should mandate in a consistent way.
...On the PocketPC: Not so much a problem installing apps to the memory card, but some would just fail on launch. Again, you're never quite sure whether it will work or not. I'm told, although this wasn't a problem on my e740, that some PocketPC models which include both Compact Flash and SD expansion slots would name both of them "Storage Card". Thus, the app would store a bunch of references to, say, "Storage Card" the Compact Flash, and then go looking for its files on "Storage Card" the SD card and fail the next time you launched it."
The above rant is found on stevenf.com, an unlikely site for a well-considered rant on the issue of storage cards and PDAs. For the most part, I'd have to agree with his conclusion. I find that most of my apps work when installed on a storage card, but not all do, and it's hard to know which ones will work before you install them. And let's not forget the "internal memory card": the Flash ROM. That's even worse! Some of my favourite programs don't function when installed to Flash ROM, which is frustrating. I never owned a Newton, but the idea of having a program be a single file is quite appealing.
I wonder why it's still so difficult to have programs work consistently from storage cards? Part of the fault lies with the developers, but also with Microsoft - the storage card naming issue is something they should mandate in a consistent way.
