Sandisk’s 1 GB microSD Memory Card Reviewed
July 26th, 2006 Jason Dunn
See that little black chip near the middle of the hard drive? That’s a 1 GB microSD card, courtesy of Sandisk. It’s sitting on top of a Seagate hard drive, also featuring 1 GB of storage. Isn’t it amazing how things change? Those of us who have seen the evolution of storage over the past decade can still remember a time when 1 GB seemed enormous. The first 1 GB hard drive was introduced to the mass market in 1995 or so, and prior to that I have not-so fond memories of using a DOS program called Stacker to double the space of my then-massive 40 MB to 80 MB…and losing the whole thing when the volume became corrupted. Ah, those were the days. Now I have 1000 MB of storage (well, 968.25 MB to be exact) in a piece of hardware the size of the fingernail on my pinky finger. Everyone I’ve shown it to is shocked at how much storage such a small device can contain - most of the uber-geeks reading this site have seen microSD cards before, but the average person has not. Cramming a gigabyte of storage into something this small is impressive. Here’s my review of using the product with my Qtek 8500.
Above is a larger image of the same card sitting atop the hard drive. As I mentioned it can store 968.25 MB worth of data - since I’m using it with the Qtek 8500 for music, I crammed as much music onto it as I could. I used Windows Media Player 10 to transcode my 256 kbps MP3s to 128 kbps WMA files to cut down on storage space, and I was able to fit 260 songs onto the card with 1.5 MB or so to spare. That’s roughly 16 hours worth of music, which is likely much more than a single charge of the battery could dish out. It’s a far cry from being able to take all my music with me, but certainly enough music to keep me entertained on a long journey.
The card retails for $74.99 directly from Sandisk, and comes with a microSD to SD converter, allowing you to use it in laptops with SD cards slots, or memory card readers that lack microSD slots. The reality is, though, that based on the awkward location of the microSD slot on the Qtek 8500, this isn’t the type of card I’ll be taking out very often. Do I wish the Qtek 8500 used miniSD instead? Sure - I’d gladly slap a 2 GB card in there to get more storage, but my hunch is that in order to built the phone this slim, microSD was the only option. I’m currently waiting for a response to an email interview with HTC where I ask them why they went with microSD on this phone - watch for that interview to appear on Smartphone Thoughts.
To access the microSD slot on the Qtek 8500, first you have to take off the battery cover. Easy enough. Them you have to remove the SIM (you can see my Fido SIM above) and the microSD slot can be seen (shown below):
Then you flip up the microSD holder, and slide the card into it (shown above). It’s easy to feel like you’re performing surgery because the pieces are all so tiny. Once the microSD card is in the holder, you fold the hinge forward so the gold contacts connect. Slide the SIM gently back in, put the battery cover back on, and you’re back in business.
The card is nestled so deep inside the Qtek 8500, I didn’t bother testing the read/write speeds: once this card is in the phone, it’s not coming out unless there’s a problem, or it gets replaced with a bigger one. And because the Qtek 8500 only offers USB 1.1 speeds, the microSD card is not the bottleneck (but that’s something I’ll cover in another post). Cost-wise, the 1 GB microSD comes in at 7.4 cents per MB. That’s more than the 5.9 cents per MB you’d pay for a 1 GB SD card, but not far off. Given that the 512 MB microSD card costs $44.99, the best value for the dollar is with the 1 GB version.
Most memory cards are pretty easy to review: they either work or they don’t. This 1 GB microSD card from Sandisk does it’s job well, without glitches, and is a reasonable price. If you have a Windows Mobile device that uses microSD, and you want to cram as much storage as you can into it, this is the product to buy.