SD Speed

[palm boy]

I am considering buying a 64mb expansion card for my m130 and I am curius about the speed of the card. If it is not fast i will just store photos on it and not apps. Otherwise i will free up room on my palm and put pictures on it.

[m130]

I can't give you numbers, but I have never noticed the sd card to be slow with applications, just with large photos.

http://www.palm.com/support/downloads/fatfs.html

This link can speed up the access time too. Palm doesn't mention the m130, but I have had it for a few months now and the performance is a lot better.

[Telyx]

I use FireViewer to view my pictures, and it supports expansion cards--if you put the pictures in the directory /Palm/Programs/FireViewer.

You CAN put them in sub-folders within /FireViewer, too, and this helps speed things up by not making the Palm look through the whole card anytime you want to view a picture. In FireViewer, select the folder on the card that you want to look in, and it only has to look through that one to find a particular picture.

Actually opening pictures from the card doesn't take very long--about 6 seconds for a 726K greyscale picture.

Apps don't take very long to load from the card, either. What takes longest, if you don't have an add-on launcher, is the Palm launcher scanning the card to make the list of apps when you pick the "card" category. If you have a lot of apps in the /Palm/Launcher directory (where the device moves or copies files when you use the Copy or Move to Card function), it can take several seconds for the list to appear. Launcher III (and its successor, LauncherX) and other launchers "remember" which apps are on the card and create icons with little markers to let you know which ones are on the card. (You can move these icons into different category tabs, too.) If you install or delete any apps to or from the card, the launcher will have to refresh, but at least it doesn't have to rebuild the list every time you want to access an app on the card.

Almost all of my apps are on my card, as are all of my documents/e-books for iSilo and almost all of my pictures.

(Speed-wise, the Flash Springboard on my Visor Deluxe was incredibly fast, but you can't create directories on it--so, for example, FireViewer can't "see" pictures on the Springboard, because they need to be in a specific directory on a card. iSilo free could see all of my documents, though, and apps ran fine as long as their databases were left in RAM, if those DBs changed between HotSyncs.)

[palm boy]

Thank you m130 and Telyx. One of my friends said it ran really slow using his bible. But i think he is using a multi media card.

Telyx, is the fireviewer soft-ware free or does it cost money?
Actualy I would apretiate it if you could post the link.

[m130]

I don't think the fact about SD vs. MMC would make a huge difference with the speed. I am guessing that the bible is one HUGE file. For an idea, the Lord of the Ring Part I is 554K. I am sure that the bible would at least three times as big. BTW, LotR II is opening next Wednesday!!!!!

Fireviewer is freeware
http://www.fireviewer.com/index.html

[palm boy]

The bible is a very lage file, and
LORD OF THE RINGS IS COOL

[Telyx]

FireViewer Suite is now shareware, but (at least this WAS the case) the viewer for the Palm is free and you pay for the converter you use on your PC to convert pictures. I think the converter was limited in features if you don't register it--it wouldn't compress large pictures!

Try www.firepad.com and I think palmgear.com has it too.

[palm boy]

Thank you, Telyx