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False, memory stick was faster

but the Duo and Duo Pro offer no improvements upon their original designs aside from form factor

And speed

It should be noted that Duo sockets cannot accept non-Duo media

There are adapters.

Sony has a very bad history with proprietary media formats (Beta, MD, MS, MagicGate, UMD...).

At present, there are over 600 supporting companies* from a diverse range of fields MS seems to be doing fine, UMD is selling fine and has been declared a standard, Beta is being used for just about all News stations, and MD was rather popular. So you were only right on magicgate

Why shouldn't Sony stick to MemoryStick? They have excellent form factor, are fast and the PRO variant scales to 32GB. It's not a locked Sony technology, in fact the PRO spec was co-op'ed with SanDisc. You can easily buy Lexar, SanDisc or Sony MS media.

http://www.memorystick.org/
http://www.memorystick.com/

> Without standards, there's no volume.

Actually MS is the second most popular format, and with 2 million PlayStationPortables rolling off the assembly line each month this summer - there will be 10's of million more MS users just this year ...

The last two years, both SD and MS has outsold CF. In 2004 SD had 31% of the market while MS had 22% in the US, the numbers are even more favourable in Japan.

I always though Sony's memory stick format looked like Trek's isolinear chips. Grim outlook on the future, eh?

Sony wouldn't be able to read the cluestick even if was passed to them, it's incompatible with the Memorystick technology that they're so in love with...

Sony is rarely about putting out good technology, they're more about putting out technology that consumers will buy despite a higher-than-usual profit margin on the price. Sure, every consumer electronics company has to make a profit or it won't exist, but Sony products are always higher-priced than technically equal models from other brands. Basically, Sony's profits come only from people too stupid to notice there's a better choice on most items.

More proprietary you mean since barely any non-Sony devices use memory stick.

Yeah, except for stuff made by NTT, Samsung, Acer, Konica, Lexmark, Mitsubishi, Brother, HP, Kenwood, Toshiba, etc.

Besides, Memory Stick is the youngest of the top 3 competing memory card formats, so what's your problem?

I know on principle that I'm not going to lock myself into their products or media when I can't use the cards interchangeably with other devices I might own.

Sony products are not necessarily limited to Memory Stick. You don't have a good case either way.

Still, keyboards communicate at 1.5 mbs. This should be plenty for now, unless you have keyboard with hub, or builtin card reader or so. I think this more points out that the customers want the fastest whatever they'll actually be able to use it or not. They want a keyboard at 480 mbs, 'cos they can say that they have it, or because they belive that it is going to be better. But it is not. Most equipment, like hard drives, cdroms, and so don't use a full 480 mbs. Some hardrives might do however... But a keyboard? Would the average user benefit from a USB keyboard? I don't think so. They're (yet) more exspencive, they are although a bit better in some aspects, but (almost) anything you can do on a USB keyboard, you can do on a PS2/DIN keyboard. The only exception I can think of, is when you have flash card readers and so on builtin, as mentioned above, but even then 11 mbs should be enough, with a transerrate of 11 mps, you get roughly 1.2 MB/second theoretical, I would guess under one MB second at maximal in real life. A compact flash, can transfer 8-16 MB/sec. Memorystick has a rate of 14.4mbs write speed, and 19.6 mbs read speed, thus I guess the average user would not get a real difference between full-speed(11 mbs)USB and High speed @ 480 mbs. 1.5 would although be a bit to slow. If you have a card on 128mb, it would take ~15 seconds to read it out, and ~20 to write full. However, I've not tested this, so this is just a estimate.

Actually, memory stick devices are made by dozens of companies (companies like Kenwood, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Acer, Fujitsu, Samsung, HP, and Lexmark).

And I doubt the $4 is the licensing fee. According to memorystick.org, the licensing fees to develop a memory stick product are 500,000 Yen/year (about $4,000) with no running royalty.

no other PalmOS based PDAs use them.
Acer makes some PalmOS based PDA's that use Memory stick.

There are also many types of non-memory expansions you can get for those PDAs
And Sony makes GPS, Bluetooth, and Camera memory stick modules.

In fact, you might be surprized at the number of devices that support memory stick (Kenwood, Pioneer, Samsung, HP, Fujitsu, NEC, Alpine, Konica, Mitsubishi, and Sharp are among the companies that make memory stick devices)

no other PalmOS based PDAs use them.
Acer makes some PalmOS based PDA's that use Memory stick.

There are also many types of non-memory expansions you can get for those PDAs
And Sony makes GPS, Bluetooth, and Camera memory stick modules.

In fact, you might be surprized at the number of devices that support memory stick (Kenwood, Pioneer, Samsung, HP, Fujitsu, NEC, Alpine, Konica, Mitsubishi, and Sharp are among the companies that make memory stick devices)

Erm... no. The best thing about it is how durable it is. If you drop it and step on it, you are not going to break it, try that with some other flash.