Meantime, AT&T has warned customers via Engadget that only Certified for Windows Phone 7 microSD cards
should be used in Microsofts mobile devices. The reason, according to the mobile carrier, is that the Windows Phone platform requires a certified high-speed microSD card for optimal performance.""
When you add an SD card to the Windows Phone 7, the OS sees it as available memory. The problem is that (like Apple iOS) the OS doesn't have the a way to differentiate between it and its normal memory, since it wasn't designed with that in mind.
Samsung went against Microsoft's requirements and added the SD card anyway. The way the OS uses the card, however, is as its core memory. So, if the phone has 8 Gig and someone adds a 32gig SD card, the phone uses it as 40 Gig of NON removable memory. It needs to format the card as a part of its secure file system so that it can work correctly.
There isn't anyway around that with this OS since everything was designed to run isolated. Each program has it's own isolated "file system" for storage and no programs can see into the isolated storage of another program.
Samsung (and Dell) were told not to add the SD cards because of that fact, but they did it anyway.
Now... as for the types of cards... Samsung says that they must be approved cards, but don't specify what that means. Since they didn't do that, Microsoft published a document outlining which cards they were able to get to work sufficiently with those phones. (They have to be fast cards and allow the secure communications as well, hence the SD in the name.) By the way... if any computer formats a SD card securely, it can not be read by another computer, which is what makes them secure! (Most people don't use the secure features on SD cards... they just use it as a basic flash storage device, unlike Windows Phone 7.)
Since Microsoft didn't approve of SD cards on the phones to begin with, I'm not sure how they can be blamed for this. Samsung is the one who messed up here.
However, since the damage is done... giving everybody an understanding of how they are working is the best we can do. The only real drawback if you put an SD card in one of these phones, is that you can not remove it without resetting the phone. You also can not use it for other computers, since it has been formatted securely, unless you reformat it without security.
(Full disclosure... I work for Microsoft and have been intimately involved in this project.)
On slashdot they are saying that Win7forPhones thrashes the card so hard that if it's not carefully vetted the card will be very quickly permanently damaged. They are also saying that once the card has been trashed by W74P it cannot be recovered by any means that have been tried.
In Microsoft's favor it must be admitted that the card is underneath the battery and under a sticker that says DON'T MESS WITH THIS.
However, considering the ubiquity of SD cards and the fact that nearly everything uses them in standard ways, you really can't blame people for thinking that the sticker warning is just more BS trying to get you to overpay for an easy expansion. And the people who are likely to try it are also likely to be highly ticked off that it doesn't work and highly vocal about it on the internet. So regardless of original intention, it was a very stupid move.
Hmmm... there is no evidence of "thrashing" in the OS... I think that's purely speculation on someone's part. There are, however, performance considerations between reads and writes that would cause a card to fail a write after a read or vise versa. If the card can not keep up with the data stream, then it can become corrupted. However, the card can be reformatted without issue if that is the case.
I highly doubt that anyone has been able to actually get one to fail the way you describe considering that the phone was just introduced on Monday.
Again, Microsoft didn't design the OS to use SD cards... so there was no expectation that this would be an issue. The formatting by the OS was based on a fixed Flash memory chip... not removable media. (By the way, the iPhone doesn't have SD card expansion either.)
The design of these OSs is different than your older phones. The design considerations around why the OS was made the way it was would take us months to describe, but I'll try in a few paragraphs. :-)
Suffice to say, the OS is locked down to prevent "bad user experiences" like we had on our previous platform and the Android based devices are having Today. Having a "sandboxed" environment allows a much more reliable and consistant phone experience. That's an idea we got from the iPhone... however, we made it a little more flexible to support multiple manufactures and carriers. (Remember, Apple only has one customer right now, AT&T.) We have a set of hardware standards that the carriers must meet at a minimum before they even get the OS. They're also not allowed to modify the OS in any way, which prevents the fragmentation and issues we saw with the previous Windows Mobile OS.
We rethought the phone from the ground up, including the user experience and the business model. This is just our first entry into that market, however, and we've designed it with several years of future growth built in. It's designed to be a connected device, where the cloud becomes the storage mechanism of choice. Think about Music, Videos, etc. If you want all your music and video on your phone then copying it to the phone seems logical enough. However, before too long, even a few movies will quickly consume all the available space on the phone.
Our philosophy is to use the expanding wireless capabilities to augment the phone instead. Netflix today is already streaming videos over the air and we think that all services will move to that model in the future. Another example, your e-mail. It's already stored in the cloud as well... so why duplicate it on the local device?
My point is that we designed the device to be in a connected world... not isolated. In that scenerio, expandable memory isn't necessary, which is why we didn't concentrate on it.
Bill , I use my yahoo server to serve 90% of my songs right in to my phone .
cconsidering the danger sidekick incendent I am not a Huge fan of relying on the cloud for everything .
One huge one is where there is no coveriage . EG aircraft .
untill that pipe to the nameless server is at 100% the cloud is to me a poor choice . and considering how cranky ISPs are and Cell ISPs with there transfer limits one could easly rack up a $400 bill to ma bell. the second month i had the centro I did go over the 6 G limit. not good .
It's designed to be a connected device, where the cloud becomes the storage mechanism of choice. Think about Music, Videos, etc. If you want all your music and video on your phone then copying it to the phone seems logical enough. However, before too long, even a few movies will quickly consume all the available space on the phone.
on one side its a great idea . but I see a huge down side ..
DRM ..Every large company from apple to OMG SONY to MS is guilty of being bribed/manhandled by MPAA and RIAA.
See as soon as " company X " cloud service is hosting a good sum of music the RIAA is goign to want to have a peek in side to see if there is any Fileshareing going on .. and in order to not have X sued , X will let them in . and start to require users to buy there content from a value added provider . Like Itunes store was with there DRM and 5 user EULAs ..
In lay mans terms the LP I own of the BeeGees will never be allowd to play on cloud platform in 5 years . nor my file Cabinet sized CD library...
One of the neet tricks of the palm OS was how it saved web content
If I click on a MP3 or MP4 or PDF or any other file it lets me
Play ... save to INT disk.. save to SD .or save as a ringtone.
so no matter where I get my data I can save it ..
so I load my phone with My server . FTP up to my server>> and FTP or just via HTTP save them off the server .
now Ill admit I am NOT a normal user . most consumers dont care about how there data is stored or how things get from point a to b . they will buy what ever is needed to stay up to date . so it will work for 90+% of users .
but us power users who are aware of how things work will allwas no matter how we try be unhappy .
I like the WebOS mind set . but the Pre and Pixi are not my bag of tea . so Iam holding out to see what HP does with palm/WebOS and its system.
There are so many things wrong with this I hardly know where to start:
When you add an SD card to the Windows Phone 7, the OS sees it as available memory.
Using a FLASH device, with it's limits on number of rewrites, just seems daft to me. Correct me if I'm wrong. Better to add more RAM chips.
The problem is that (like Apple iOS) the OS doesn't have the a way to differentiate between it and its normal memory.
Given that a modern smart phone is more computer than phone the inability to deal with standard removable devices is inexcusable.
...since it wasn't designed with that in mind.
Perhaps it should have been.
Samsung went against Microsoft's requirements and added the SD card anyway.
and
Samsung (and Dell) were told not to add the SD cards because of that fact, but they did it anyway.
This is appalling, Samsung and Dell are building decent hardware, who is Microsoft to dictate how it should look? Hopefully they can find a more suitable OS for their platforms.
Samsung is the one who messed up here.
Again appalling. The OS can't handle bog standard removable media in a way users have been doing on numerous other systems for years and some how it's Samsung's fault? I don't think so.
The only real drawback if you put an SD card in one of these phones, is that you can not remove it without resetting the phone....
Unlike every other device I have that uses SD cards, that's rather a big drawback already given that a phone should have as little down time as possible.
You also can not use it for other computers, since it has been formatted securely, unless you reformat it without security.
So whatever data I have on it is locked in there and I can't get data in . Useless.
There are, however, performance considerations between reads and writes that would cause a card to fail a write after a read or vise versa. If the card can not keep up with the data stream, then it can become corrupted.
Appalling. Assuming we accept the idea of a FLASH device as a "swap" device this is not making any sense. Operating systems have been using all kind of drives for swap space for decades. They don't just corrupt data because a particular device is a bit slow.
Again, Microsoft didn't design the OS to use SD cards.
Perhaps that was a mistake.
We have a set of hardware standards that the carriers must meet at a minimum before they even get the OS.
Except that Samsung and Del have the OS despite going against the "standard"
We rethought the phone from the ground up, including the user experience and the business model.
I know I'm not going to like what follows...
It's designed to be a connected device, where the cloud becomes the storage mechanism of choice.
Thought so. "connect device" - yes of course. "cloud becomes the storage mechanism" - I have a problem with the way "cloud" is defined now a days.
In a typical example of marketing double speak the term "cloud" has been twisted around to mean exactly the opposite one might expect.
To me a "cloud" is a nebulous loosely connected thing that floats about. Data in a computing "cloud" would likewise be distributed or moving around wherever.
However current uses of the term "cloud" refer to single points that are under ownership and control by a single entity.
Example: Does my email sit in "the cloud"?. No. It sits on a giant server in my case run by Google. Yes that's thousands of computers somewhere with Google but logically it is one big server on the end of the net to me.
Example: Do YouTube videos come from the "cloud"? No. They come from the YouTube server.
Example: Apple's appstore and itunes. Well I think you get the point.
I would prefer if my cloud was in my basement or with one or more hosting providers of my choice. I would prefer it that when I want to watch a vid or hear a tune or deal with whatever other data it can come to me from any of a the millions of computers in the world that happen to have it. The real "cloud". bittorent provides a cloud, others do not.
By the way, my SD cards, that float from machine to machine moving big gobs of data, ARE part of my idea of "cloud".
...locked down to prevent "bad user experiences"..."sandboxed" environment...
I'm very sure that all this is more to do with DRM, copyrights, politics, pandering to "content" suppliers dreams and marketing than it is to do with the technical problems of building a reliable operating system.
OK. Rant over. If nothing else the Windows Phone is guilty of formatting users SD cards and destroying their data without asking.
MS has ALWAYS had problems with handling memory on portable devices.
I believe they didn't include automatic allocation between running programs and files before WinCE 3.0?
Incidentally, my Psion Organiser II CM with a 8bit CPU did that in 1986...
If 8KB wasn't enough(later models had 16/32/64KB or special POS machines with up to96KB), you could use battery-backed RAM, or EPROMs for file storage.
(Yes, the type you erase with ultraviolet light. They even had a mail-in erase service)
The Psion Organiser 3, from 1990 topped that by going 16bit(NEC V30) and from 128 - 2048MB RAM and seamless Plug'n Play.
In fact, I can open a file on a memory card, remove the card and insert another, and when I try to save the file, it'll tell me which card I needed to reinsert...
Of course, it helped that it had fully pre-emptive multitasking.
In 1999 they launched the netBook... 32 or 64MB RAM, NO ROM... 190MHz StrongARM.
When booted, it would look on the drive(CD-card) or on the serial connection for a image-file which it would load into RAM, then write-protect. The netBook, the S7(slower and cheaper version with Flash ROM) and the other machines in that series all have 'Execute in Place', so that unlike in a certain 'other' OS, the programs don't need more space when running, just working memory for data.
(This worked for both ROM/FLASH/Virtual ROM, and for programs stored on 'C:'
FUD! AT & T is a mobile carrier. Not a manufacturer. An AT & T is the only one in USA. In Germany, Telekom is the only one...
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. AT&T, in the US, is Apple's only customer. AT&T is not the manufacurer and I never said they were so how is the FUD?
Gadgetman . this is my opinion why Pison and palm does so well at hand helds . Its there baby , They are a HH company . simple ..
MS is a desktop OS and office company with a split in to gaming .
Yes they have had a long line of HH deveces WnCE and the like BUT its not "there bag "
Its like buying a sony toaster . Or a apple microwave...
same with Apple . yes they had a SWEET newton system but Jobbs axed it in 98 , and used very little of the lessons leanrd from Newton on there IXXX devises ...My newton MP2100 can take PCMCIA to CF with a 8 GB card in it !/ for a 10 Y old device this is amazing .
and I can use it on Wifi too ..frankly one must look back at thease devices to look forward to better new ones ..
Yes teh android system is fragmanted .. JUST LIKE THE PC industry
but its the most open system we have . coming from a apple fanboy this is big .
RIM is on its way out . there days are numberd . why .
the suit and tie who owns one no longer needs a blackberry to use enterprise features . apple and android both a have put on a suit and tie in the last 3 years . and RIM's lack of diverse OS support makes it a looseing battle there lack of OSX and liunx support was why I did not get a storm .
palm as we know it is dead ..........
but as long as HP has some $$ there going to revive there HH devision with WebOS and I hope make some neat new devices soon .
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here.
With a little more context:
"however, we made it a little more flexible to support multiple manufactures and carriers. (Remember, Apple only has one customer right now, AT&T.)"
... it shows that AT & T and Apple was just oranges.
What difference does it make in how many carriers a product is sold through? None.
What difference does it make in how many carriers a product is sold through? None.
Actually, that's not the case. Each phone must be taylored to the specific carriers network capabilites. It might not seem like it, but in reality, there are different radio standards, frequencies, protocols, etc. that must be adjusted for each phone to enable that. Apple doesn't have to deal with that with their model. Android, Symbian and Windows Phone all do.
FUD again!
So the iPhone works only with AT&T? That's obviously nonsense. Just the fact that you can buy iPhones unlocked suggests that "there might be different radio standards, frequencies, protocols" it can be adjusted to.
The world doesn't end at the west-coast nor at the east-coast. Apple knows that, they sell worldwide and can handle a enough of standards (UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)).
Each phone must be taylored to the specific carriers network capabilites.
Oh yeah, I also want to point out that this is only a problem on the Samsung Focus phone... none of the other Windows Phone 7 devices have this problem.
It it appears that AT&T requested the memory upgrade feature from Samsung so that they could "upsell" the devices with larger memory for more $. The problem was they didn't fully test the memory cards they supplied to the stores and most of them didn't work.
Oh yeah, the feature apparently is called "unified memory" from Samsung. Microsoft is also (according to various reports) working on a fix that will allow the phone to continue to work even if the memory card is pulled. The issue they have is that the flash is the storage mechanism for some of the downloaded apps... and if the card is removed, then those apps go away.
Oh yeah, I also want to point out that this is only a problem on the Samsung Focus phone... none of the other Windows Phone 7 devices have this problem.
The other interesting thing is that cards initialized on WP7 are locked to a specific device, and moreover, stop being recognized on the desktop - perhaps permanently. I took the card out of the Surround and spent considerable time trying to make it format, first on Windows, then OSX, and finally linux by trying to write zeros and random data to the disk using dd. This failed, as I only managed to get 'medium not present' errors every step of the way - in fdisk, gparted, every trick I know for really nuking storage. If you decide to upgrade your WP7 device, just be warned that it's probably one-way for your card.
Sounds like a pretty nonstandard way to set up a uSD card by any usual measure.
Sounds like a pretty nonstandard way to set up a uSD card by any usual measure.
Wow... I haven't seen this before... they actually tore apart the phone to get to an internal MicroSD card. I guess that HTC really didn't want someone to replace it then, huh?
It's really not that unusual for people to take devices apart to that degree for the purpose of upgrading them, especially once they're a little older and the upgrade is a lot cheaper than it would have been when the product was new. I'm familiar with several devices (in industry this is quite common) where there is internal SD, uSD, or CompactFlash which the manufacturer really doesn't expect you to change, but if you try it you'll find that the media behave normally. This way of handling the card is quite unusual and, without some warning more specific than "warranty void" a lot of people would be very surprised by it.
This way of handling the card is quite unusual and, without some warning more specific than "warranty void" a lot of people would be very surprised by it.
I'm not sure I'd call it unusual... just misunderstood. The SD Card specification includes the ability to protect the contents of the cards and for these devices, that is being implemented. The organization that defines the SD Card standard is here. http://www.sdcard.org
Most people use the SD card as a standard MMC card, instead of the SD spec. (They're based on the same design.)
Apparently the reason they can't reformat them is that they are using the incorrect tools to do it. You have to have a "special" tool to do it according to that site.
And you're right, they should more clearly label that in the future (which I'm sure they will.)
So, I want to know about the "special tool" thing.
For example I have an SD card that for whatever reason cannot be formatted and is now useless. Somehow this happened as I was using it with Windows XP, Linux and the various Propeller FAT drivers with no special effort on my part.
I have yet to find any tool that will undo whatever has happened to it. I refuse to believe that I have worn it out physically.
wjsteele, that way of using SD cards is *very* unusual -- for such a ubiquitous item, I've neither seen nor ever heard of anyone ever using one that way.
According to one of the posts on the /. thread the SD standard contains a lot of obsolete cruft. (Some of this is good; uSD doesn't explicitly support SPI but every uSD card anyone has ever reported on has done so, which is good for us in embedded land). But apparently Microsoft is using one of these somewhat obsolete mechanisms to lock the card to the Win7 device -- and there *are no* commonly available tools to unlock the card. I suppose such tools will eventually appear as the hackers realize they're needed, but for the moment it's all WTF nobody uses SD this way.
It really isn't that hard to wrap a flat extent of SD in a header that resembles a FAT32 formatted file system with one locked contiguous file, so that the extent can be treated as flat memory but the card remains accessible by normal devices. I really can't think of any good reason for Microsoft to take this approach, except pure laziness possibly coupled with some kind of worry about DRM'ed content getting exported from the phone. In any case it's a highly nonstandard and ugly hack and I'm glad you at least admit the warning should be more clear for people who think it will work like every other SD interface in history.
wjsteele, that way of using SD cards is *very* unusual...
That goes back to the original problem. Microsoft didn't design the OS to support SD cards at all. They're using the SD format internally to protect the internal Flash. The device manufacturers were told not to use SD, but they did it anyway.
That goes back to the original problem. Microsoft didn't design the OS to support SD cards at all. They're using the SD format internally to protect the internal Flash. The device manufacturers were told not to use SD, but they did it anyway.
This makes no sense at all. If the OS was not meant to support SD cards, why is it even possible for it to use a SD card? Somebody had to go to the effort to create these weird SD drivers that put the card in a mode nobody else uses. This didn't happen because those nasty people at Samsung and HP decided to use an unauthorized part -- it happened because Microsoft said "and if you do use SD, here's the driver."
Localroger, there's no difference in the driver for flash mmory or for SD. SD is just a repackaging of of a standard flash chip.
As for the EULA, Peter... no. The EULA is the "End User License Agreement." However, there is a seperate license agreement to allow them to manufacturer and build with the OS and defines the minimum hardware specs. In fact, the hardware spec specifically requires a minimum of 8 gigabytes of "Internal Flash Memory" and states that "Removable Media Is Not Supported."
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
Comments
Meantime, AT&T has warned customers via Engadget that only Certified for Windows Phone 7 microSD cards
should be used in Microsofts mobile devices. The reason, according to the mobile carrier, is that the Windows Phone platform requires a certified high-speed microSD card for optimal performance.""
And I thought apple was Nuts .
way to go MS .. you shure ARE open . LOLS
I smell a KIN in the makeing .
Peter
Samsung went against Microsoft's requirements and added the SD card anyway. The way the OS uses the card, however, is as its core memory. So, if the phone has 8 Gig and someone adds a 32gig SD card, the phone uses it as 40 Gig of NON removable memory. It needs to format the card as a part of its secure file system so that it can work correctly.
There isn't anyway around that with this OS since everything was designed to run isolated. Each program has it's own isolated "file system" for storage and no programs can see into the isolated storage of another program.
Samsung (and Dell) were told not to add the SD cards because of that fact, but they did it anyway.
Now... as for the types of cards... Samsung says that they must be approved cards, but don't specify what that means. Since they didn't do that, Microsoft published a document outlining which cards they were able to get to work sufficiently with those phones. (They have to be fast cards and allow the secure communications as well, hence the SD in the name.) By the way... if any computer formats a SD card securely, it can not be read by another computer, which is what makes them secure! (Most people don't use the secure features on SD cards... they just use it as a basic flash storage device, unlike Windows Phone 7.)
Since Microsoft didn't approve of SD cards on the phones to begin with, I'm not sure how they can be blamed for this. Samsung is the one who messed up here.
However, since the damage is done... giving everybody an understanding of how they are working is the best we can do. The only real drawback if you put an SD card in one of these phones, is that you can not remove it without resetting the phone. You also can not use it for other computers, since it has been formatted securely, unless you reformat it without security.
(Full disclosure... I work for Microsoft and have been intimately involved in this project.)
Bill
In Microsoft's favor it must be admitted that the card is underneath the battery and under a sticker that says DON'T MESS WITH THIS.
However, considering the ubiquity of SD cards and the fact that nearly everything uses them in standard ways, you really can't blame people for thinking that the sticker warning is just more BS trying to get you to overpay for an easy expansion. And the people who are likely to try it are also likely to be highly ticked off that it doesn't work and highly vocal about it on the internet. So regardless of original intention, it was a very stupid move.
it was a Very Poor move for both companys .
IMHO If it does not work then FIX IT so we can use it as extended MEM. Or have big brawny MS force Samsung to remove them.
FYI My Old Palm centro of 2007 DOES IT RIGHT ! why not the super duper fancy phones today !?.
its 64M internal is addressable as a diff Drive LIKE IN A PC from the SD slot .
I can choose in allmost every App where i store the data..
a Smart phone IS a computer thease days . treat it as one .
I dont see why my old clamshell Ibook from 00' does more then a IOS4 phone .
I highly doubt that anyone has been able to actually get one to fail the way you describe considering that the phone was just introduced on Monday.
Again, Microsoft didn't design the OS to use SD cards... so there was no expectation that this would be an issue. The formatting by the OS was based on a fixed Flash memory chip... not removable media. (By the way, the iPhone doesn't have SD card expansion either.)
Bill
The design of these OSs is different than your older phones. The design considerations around why the OS was made the way it was would take us months to describe, but I'll try in a few paragraphs. :-)
Suffice to say, the OS is locked down to prevent "bad user experiences" like we had on our previous platform and the Android based devices are having Today. Having a "sandboxed" environment allows a much more reliable and consistant phone experience. That's an idea we got from the iPhone... however, we made it a little more flexible to support multiple manufactures and carriers. (Remember, Apple only has one customer right now, AT&T.) We have a set of hardware standards that the carriers must meet at a minimum before they even get the OS. They're also not allowed to modify the OS in any way, which prevents the fragmentation and issues we saw with the previous Windows Mobile OS.
We rethought the phone from the ground up, including the user experience and the business model. This is just our first entry into that market, however, and we've designed it with several years of future growth built in. It's designed to be a connected device, where the cloud becomes the storage mechanism of choice. Think about Music, Videos, etc. If you want all your music and video on your phone then copying it to the phone seems logical enough. However, before too long, even a few movies will quickly consume all the available space on the phone.
Our philosophy is to use the expanding wireless capabilities to augment the phone instead. Netflix today is already streaming videos over the air and we think that all services will move to that model in the future. Another example, your e-mail. It's already stored in the cloud as well... so why duplicate it on the local device?
My point is that we designed the device to be in a connected world... not isolated. In that scenerio, expandable memory isn't necessary, which is why we didn't concentrate on it.
Bill
cconsidering the danger sidekick incendent I am not a Huge fan of relying on the cloud for everything .
One huge one is where there is no coveriage . EG aircraft .
untill that pipe to the nameless server is at 100% the cloud is to me a poor choice . and considering how cranky ISPs are and Cell ISPs with there transfer limits one could easly rack up a $400 bill to ma bell. the second month i had the centro I did go over the 6 G limit. not good .
on one side its a great idea . but I see a huge down side ..
DRM ..Every large company from apple to OMG SONY to MS is guilty of being bribed/manhandled by MPAA and RIAA.
See as soon as " company X " cloud service is hosting a good sum of music the RIAA is goign to want to have a peek in side to see if there is any Fileshareing going on .. and in order to not have X sued , X will let them in . and start to require users to buy there content from a value added provider . Like Itunes store was with there DRM and 5 user EULAs ..
In lay mans terms the LP I own of the BeeGees will never be allowd to play on cloud platform in 5 years . nor my file Cabinet sized CD library...
One of the neet tricks of the palm OS was how it saved web content
If I click on a MP3 or MP4 or PDF or any other file it lets me
Play ... save to INT disk.. save to SD .or save as a ringtone.
so no matter where I get my data I can save it ..
so I load my phone with My server . FTP up to my server>> and FTP or just via HTTP save them off the server .
now Ill admit I am NOT a normal user . most consumers dont care about how there data is stored or how things get from point a to b . they will buy what ever is needed to stay up to date . so it will work for 90+% of users .
but us power users who are aware of how things work will allwas no matter how we try be unhappy .
I like the WebOS mind set . but the Pre and Pixi are not my bag of tea . so Iam holding out to see what HP does with palm/WebOS and its system.
FUD!
AT & T is a mobile carrier. Not a manufacturer. An AT & T is the only one in USA. In Germany, Telekom is the only one. In Italy ...
Nick
There are so many things wrong with this I hardly know where to start:
Using a FLASH device, with it's limits on number of rewrites, just seems daft to me. Correct me if I'm wrong. Better to add more RAM chips.
Given that a modern smart phone is more computer than phone the inability to deal with standard removable devices is inexcusable.
Perhaps it should have been.
and
This is appalling, Samsung and Dell are building decent hardware, who is Microsoft to dictate how it should look? Hopefully they can find a more suitable OS for their platforms.
Again appalling. The OS can't handle bog standard removable media in a way users have been doing on numerous other systems for years and some how it's Samsung's fault? I don't think so.
Unlike every other device I have that uses SD cards, that's rather a big drawback already given that a phone should have as little down time as possible.
So whatever data I have on it is locked in there and I can't get data in . Useless.
Appalling. Assuming we accept the idea of a FLASH device as a "swap" device this is not making any sense. Operating systems have been using all kind of drives for swap space for decades. They don't just corrupt data because a particular device is a bit slow.
Perhaps that was a mistake.
Except that Samsung and Del have the OS despite going against the "standard"
I know I'm not going to like what follows...
Thought so. "connect device" - yes of course. "cloud becomes the storage mechanism" - I have a problem with the way "cloud" is defined now a days.
In a typical example of marketing double speak the term "cloud" has been twisted around to mean exactly the opposite one might expect.
To me a "cloud" is a nebulous loosely connected thing that floats about. Data in a computing "cloud" would likewise be distributed or moving around wherever.
However current uses of the term "cloud" refer to single points that are under ownership and control by a single entity.
Example: Does my email sit in "the cloud"?. No. It sits on a giant server in my case run by Google. Yes that's thousands of computers somewhere with Google but logically it is one big server on the end of the net to me.
Example: Do YouTube videos come from the "cloud"? No. They come from the YouTube server.
Example: Apple's appstore and itunes. Well I think you get the point.
I would prefer if my cloud was in my basement or with one or more hosting providers of my choice. I would prefer it that when I want to watch a vid or hear a tune or deal with whatever other data it can come to me from any of a the millions of computers in the world that happen to have it. The real "cloud". bittorent provides a cloud, others do not.
By the way, my SD cards, that float from machine to machine moving big gobs of data, ARE part of my idea of "cloud".
I'm very sure that all this is more to do with DRM, copyrights, politics, pandering to "content" suppliers dreams and marketing than it is to do with the technical problems of building a reliable operating system.
OK. Rant over. If nothing else the Windows Phone is guilty of formatting users SD cards and destroying their data without asking.
MS has ALWAYS had problems with handling memory on portable devices.
I believe they didn't include automatic allocation between running programs and files before WinCE 3.0?
Incidentally, my Psion Organiser II CM with a 8bit CPU did that in 1986...
If 8KB wasn't enough(later models had 16/32/64KB or special POS machines with up to96KB), you could use battery-backed RAM, or EPROMs for file storage.
(Yes, the type you erase with ultraviolet light. They even had a mail-in erase service)
The Psion Organiser 3, from 1990 topped that by going 16bit(NEC V30) and from 128 - 2048MB RAM and seamless Plug'n Play.
In fact, I can open a file on a memory card, remove the card and insert another, and when I try to save the file, it'll tell me which card I needed to reinsert...
Of course, it helped that it had fully pre-emptive multitasking.
In 1999 they launched the netBook... 32 or 64MB RAM, NO ROM... 190MHz StrongARM.
When booted, it would look on the
(This worked for both ROM/FLASH/Virtual ROM, and for programs stored on 'C:'
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. AT&T, in the US, is Apple's only customer. AT&T is not the manufacurer and I never said they were so how is the FUD?
Bill
MS is a desktop OS and office company with a split in to gaming .
Yes they have had a long line of HH deveces WnCE and the like BUT its not "there bag "
Its like buying a sony toaster . Or a apple microwave...
same with Apple . yes they had a SWEET newton system but Jobbs axed it in 98 , and used very little of the lessons leanrd from Newton on there IXXX devises ...My newton MP2100 can take PCMCIA to CF with a 8 GB card in it !/ for a 10 Y old device this is amazing .
and I can use it on Wifi too ..frankly one must look back at thease devices to look forward to better new ones ..
Yes teh android system is fragmanted .. JUST LIKE THE PC industry
but its the most open system we have . coming from a apple fanboy this is big .
RIM is on its way out . there days are numberd . why .
the suit and tie who owns one no longer needs a blackberry to use enterprise features . apple and android both a have put on a suit and tie in the last 3 years . and RIM's lack of diverse OS support makes it a looseing battle there lack of OSX and liunx support was why I did not get a storm .
palm as we know it is dead ..........
but as long as HP has some $$ there going to revive there HH devision with WebOS and I hope make some neat new devices soon .
With a little more context:
"however, we made it a little more flexible to support multiple manufactures and carriers. (Remember, Apple only has one customer right now, AT&T.)"
... it shows that AT & T and Apple was just oranges.
What difference does it make in how many carriers a product is sold through? None.
Nick
Actually, that's not the case. Each phone must be taylored to the specific carriers network capabilites. It might not seem like it, but in reality, there are different radio standards, frequencies, protocols, etc. that must be adjusted for each phone to enable that. Apple doesn't have to deal with that with their model. Android, Symbian and Windows Phone all do.
Bill
FUD again!
So the iPhone works only with AT&T? That's obviously nonsense. Just the fact that you can buy iPhones unlocked suggests that "there might be different radio standards, frequencies, protocols" it can be adjusted to.
The world doesn't end at the west-coast nor at the east-coast. Apple knows that, they sell worldwide and can handle a enough of standards (UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)).
Ahhh ... with Windows Mobile on it?
Nick
It it appears that AT&T requested the memory upgrade feature from Samsung so that they could "upsell" the devices with larger memory for more $. The problem was they didn't fully test the memory cards they supplied to the stores and most of them didn't work.
Oh yeah, the feature apparently is called "unified memory" from Samsung. Microsoft is also (according to various reports) working on a fix that will allow the phone to continue to work even if the memory card is pulled. The issue they have is that the flash is the storage mechanism for some of the downloaded apps... and if the card is removed, then those apps go away.
Bill
The phone that was disassembled by Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4015/htc-surround-review-pocket-boombox/8) was a HTC Surround. The reviewer found it impossible to read or reformat the card with any of the tools one would usually use for the purpose no matter how basic:
Sounds like a pretty nonstandard way to set up a uSD card by any usual measure.
but Tmobile and other are GSM too . its just SW . pre paid is possable with a craked Iphone . but the powers to be are once again not pleased ..
It can be done . we went to the moon ..
''If only geeks ran the world "
Wow... I haven't seen this before... they actually tore apart the phone to get to an internal MicroSD card. I guess that HTC really didn't want someone to replace it then, huh?
Bill
Even this old dog learned a new thing or two today in this thread...
So much of this was beyond my understanding of a few things, until pointed out here..
WOW..
KK
I'm not sure I'd call it unusual... just misunderstood. The SD Card specification includes the ability to protect the contents of the cards and for these devices, that is being implemented. The organization that defines the SD Card standard is here. http://www.sdcard.org
Most people use the SD card as a standard MMC card, instead of the SD spec. (They're based on the same design.)
Apparently the reason they can't reformat them is that they are using the incorrect tools to do it. You have to have a "special" tool to do it according to that site.
And you're right, they should more clearly label that in the future (which I'm sure they will.)
Bill
For example I have an SD card that for whatever reason cannot be formatted and is now useless. Somehow this happened as I was using it with Windows XP, Linux and the various Propeller FAT drivers with no special effort on my part.
I have yet to find any tool that will undo whatever has happened to it. I refuse to believe that I have worn it out physically.
According to one of the posts on the /. thread the SD standard contains a lot of obsolete cruft. (Some of this is good; uSD doesn't explicitly support SPI but every uSD card anyone has ever reported on has done so, which is good for us in embedded land). But apparently Microsoft is using one of these somewhat obsolete mechanisms to lock the card to the Win7 device -- and there *are no* commonly available tools to unlock the card. I suppose such tools will eventually appear as the hackers realize they're needed, but for the moment it's all WTF nobody uses SD this way.
It really isn't that hard to wrap a flat extent of SD in a header that resembles a FAT32 formatted file system with one locked contiguous file, so that the extent can be treated as flat memory but the card remains accessible by normal devices. I really can't think of any good reason for Microsoft to take this approach, except pure laziness possibly coupled with some kind of worry about DRM'ed content getting exported from the phone. In any case it's a highly nonstandard and ugly hack and I'm glad you at least admit the warning should be more clear for people who think it will work like every other SD interface in history.
That goes back to the original problem. Microsoft didn't design the OS to support SD cards at all. They're using the SD format internally to protect the internal Flash. The device manufacturers were told not to use SD, but they did it anyway.
Bill
This makes no sense at all. If the OS was not meant to support SD cards, why is it even possible for it to use a SD card? Somebody had to go to the effort to create these weird SD drivers that put the card in a mode nobody else uses. This didn't happen because those nasty people at Samsung and HP decided to use an unauthorized part -- it happened because Microsoft said "and if you do use SD, here's the driver."
As for the EULA, Peter... no. The EULA is the "End User License Agreement." However, there is a seperate license agreement to allow them to manufacturer and build with the OS and defines the minimum hardware specs. In fact, the hardware spec specifically requires a minimum of 8 gigabytes of "Internal Flash Memory" and states that "Removable Media Is Not Supported."
Bill