Add 8GB of Storage to Your Cell Phone

gd writes "MobileTechNews is reporting that a company called US modular has put out a device that taps into your existing mobile phones microSD or Tflash slot to add up to 8GB of storage. The Stik&Stor adds a memory chip to the back side of the battery pack and only costs $199 to add 8GB to your music phone."

Comments

Microdrives for 4/8GB

[SlashdotOgre]

I'd be a bit hesitant to add a microdrive to my cell phone. I'm a fairly careful person, but I tend to keep phones for roughly 2 years (for Verizon's New Every 2 Program), and my phone tends to have fallen at least a handful of times over that period. I've already heard stories of people with Palm LifeDrives which failed from less.

How big ?

[karvind]

From the article I couldn't guess the size of the 8GB microdrive. Anyone has any idea ? One from Lacie is rather big to be tagged along with a cellphone.

Re:WTF? Do you own one of these phones? Obviously

[elmegil]

So I have a question about this whole mess, having recently gotten a TF capable phone. I put a new TF card into my phone, then took it out, put it in the SD adapter, put it in my lifedrive, copied two MP3's to the "music" folder that my phone had created, and put it back into my phone.

Those were the "any" MP3's you refer to above.

They aren't seen by my phone. So clearly, your claims of technical ignorance and that "any" phone can play "any" MP3 are far overblown.

Obviously, there probably needs to be some other additional update to the phone for MP3's, but since Samsung doesn't see fit to include a USB cable with their phone, and Verizon does see fit to neuter the Bluetooth capabilities of all their phones, I'm not in a position to do it "the right way" to find out how to do it "my way".

Am I bitching about Verizon? Not really. This is a CELLPHONE for me, not an MP3 player, not anything else. And from that perspective, Verizon is the best of my options where I am at. But I was curious, and find it somewhat ironic that they market all the amazing capabilities of these phones when in fact they *aren't* as simple as you want to claim, much less how they market them. Unless of course you *like* paying three times for your music.

Vaporware Indicator: Falsified images

[Garridan]

Look at the shadows & bright spots on the "memory chip" and the cell phone. They don't line up.

If this thing is real, why'd they have to photoshop an image of it?

Re:WTF? Do you own one of these phones? Obviously

[brunes69]

They aren't seen by my phone. So clearly, your claims of technical ignorance and that "any" phone can play "any" MP3 are far overblown.

Are they VBR MP3s? If so can your phone handle those?

Are they using extended filename syour phone can't reconize?

Do you have your primary memory device even set to your TF card?

There's a plethora of reasons these may not show up, none of which have to do with DRM. If you're talking about the a950, I can assure you it can play MP3s fine. You're doing something incorrect.

how much usable, how reliable

[fermion]

This reminds of the old MS DOS 3.1 days, when we could use all sorts of tricks to upgrade to more memory, but wheather wwe could use it at a particular time was dependent upon the phase of the moon, the distribution of the electrons, or whatever. One would have all the formats, all the drivers, and hope for the best.

It seems that this might be the same case. First, the connection seems a bit fragile. Second, the current specificatins for some motoralo phone already include a memeory slot, but the maximum memory is listed at 256MB even though the current maximum memory module is 512K. This indicates that phones may have a less than GB limit, perhpas they do not include 32 bit addressing.

Re:Backwards

[syukton]

At 96kbit/sec, 8gb (67,108,864 kbits) would net you about 699,051 seconds of recording.

That's eight days of recorded audio.

Relatedly: 86,400 seconds in a day * 96kbit/sec = 8,294,400 kbits per day, or 0.988769531 gigabytes per day.

Definitely within the realm of feasibility.