Thursday, December 29, 2005

Memory cards for the Nokia 770

In anticipation of the arrival of the Nokia 770 and also because I needed a larger card for my digital camera (which uses full-sized mmc/sd cards), I ordered an rs-mmc card way back in August. Turns out of course since this is the univserve with eternally changing memory card formats, That the 770 sensibly uses 1.8v rs-mmc or dual-voltage mmc cards which draw less power. So my existing card won't work and it's time to shop for a new one.

In the interim, rs-mmc dual-voltage cards, appear to have evolved into MMCmobile, which has a higher though still compatible pin count, and vastly greater potential throughput. What the deal with the 770 is eactly I don't know, The included 64MB card has 13 pins but simply states (1.8/3.0v) multimedia card.

http://www.flashrus.com/atp/web/mmcdifference.htm

Even if the doesn't support the enhanced features of MMCmobile the newer cards should work without trouple. At some point benchmarking is probably in order to determine if one mmc card is vastly faster than another.

So anyway cards (amazon affiliate links are italic):

kingston 512MB MMCmobile

1GB rs-mmc DV cards seem to be about $80-$90 via froogle

Basically 1GB is probably the acceptable minimum for an aftermarket card, if you're planning on storing mp3s on it. The other application I've seen recently is to use a small chunk of it as swap, though to my mind that might run into issues around flash memory longevity and perhaps battery life implications, though for all I know these new mmc cards might do write balancing and sector remapping like modern cf cards.

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