User memory and MicroSD Cards - What is the Difference ?
OK im looking at the N96 and the N85.
My only question is regarding the User/Internal memory ?.
What advantages / Disadvantages are there for having more user memory on a device compared to using expansion cards ?
Does it affect what you can install on a device ?
Does it affect the speed of applications ?
(from my experience with old Psion devices it was always much faster to have everything in User Memory.
Yours Gratefully,
Robotrobbie wrote:User memory and MicroSD Cards - What is the Difference ?
Pretty obvious one is internal the other is external
Robotrobbie wrote:
OK im looking at the N96 and the N85.
My only question is regarding the User/Internal memory ?.What advantages / Disadvantages are there for having more user memory on a device compared to using expansion cards ?
It all depends on what you want to do and your own personal choice on storage. I personally store applications, messages, ringtones and themes on the phone memory and everything else on the SD card. The only advantage is being able to hold more. Anything you want to still "work" when you remove the SD card or change it ( in the case of having lots of mp3s you will need to store on the internal memory but uf you start storing video, photos and mp3s you can kiss goodbye to it pretty quickly.
The Advantages
===========
Easier to Backup ( especially messages as nokia have never provided a satisfactory way to back up your message store including all personal folders )
Keep your applications ( some even after a firmware upgrade ) this can be flaky though and sometimes requires a reinstall anyway.
The Disdvantages
=============
If you eject the card / swap out / connect in USB transfer mode any themes, messages etc revert back to the phone / defaults ( can be annoying )
Robotrobbie wrote:
Does it affect what you can install on a device ?
No
Robotrobbie wrote:
Does it affect the speed of applications ?
(from my experience with old Psion devices it was always much faster to have everything in User Memory.Yours Gratefully,
Not generally... it rearlly depends on the card and phone. Cheaper cards can suffer performance degradation its rearlly a trial and error thing.
One last thing then:-
Size Wise what are the size of applications. ? 100 kb ?
is the 70 Mb free (N85 for example)sufficient to store how many applications on average.
I plan to use External media for large datasets anyway. Video Photos MP3s etc....
Unplugged wrote:Pretty obvious one is internal the other is externalIt all depends on what you want to do and your own personal choice on storage. I personally store applications, messages, ringtones and themes on the phone memory and everything else on the SD card. The only advantage is being able to hold more. Anything you want to still "work" when you remove the SD card or change it ( in the case of having lots of mp3s you will need to store on the internal memory but uf you start storing video, photos and mp3s you can kiss goodbye to it pretty quickly.
The Advantages
===========Easier to Backup ( especially messages as nokia have never provided a satisfactory way to back up your message store including all personal folders )
Keep your applications ( some even after a firmware upgrade ) this can be flaky though and sometimes requires a reinstall anyway.
The Disdvantages
=============If you eject the card / swap out / connect in USB transfer mode any themes, messages etc revert back to the phone / defaults ( can be annoying )
No
Not generally... it rearlly depends on the card and phone. Cheaper cards can suffer performance degradation its rearlly a trial and error thing.
Some more points....
The advantage of a card is that you can upgrade its size, that it is easy to share (if you want to give some of your video clips to a friend, you can just pull out the card ... it is useful also to have a microSD-USB adapter), easy to use on services like kiosks and printers, etc.
But, if you store your apps there, then every time you pull out the card, you would lose access to those.
Sometimes it is also more practical to transfer content via the card, especially if you transfer from some other system than your PC.
The internal mass memory on the N95-8GB (8 gigabytes) and N96 (16 gigabytes) on the other hand is "fixed", i.e. it is built in and you can't lose it. You can however "mount" it on your PC in fast USB mass storage mode, so you can use it like a big memory card on the PC.
I personally would store all data, media, apps, games, etc on the biggest available storage on your device (which is the mass memory on the N96 and N95-8GB). On the N95 and N85 you want to store those things on the memory card.
The only things I would store on the so called phone memory are: messages, themes, and a very limited set of applications (there are a few apps that force you to install them there).