11 March 2007

What is the SDHC!?!

WTF is SDHC!? What is it, I don't really see what's so interesting about it? WTF it has with Symbian after all!?

Yeah I know, it hasn't anything with Symbian at first sight, actually even if you go into more detailed analysis it still hasn't anything with Symbian but it definitely has something with our lovely Symbian based phones!!

You see, as the official Nokia N95 release date gets closer, SDHC standard becoming the pretty actual and in focus nowadays and I’m getting lot of questions related to N95 memory and built in SD card slot; questions related to support for cards larger than 2 GB; questions like, "Why you are constantly repeating that N95 will not support larger cards than 2 GB and why you are so sure about", "How can you claims that we’ll have to live with 2GB?"

Therefore I've decide to stop it, write something a bit more complete about this which would clear all doubts and confusions in mind of the possible N95 owners.

So.. .

While Secure Digital (SD) memory cards are physically getting smaller, miniSD and microSD format quickly becoming a popular choice for mobile phones and as you may have already know after years of forcing MMC cards in numerous different formats Nokia has decide to switch to SD card which is good move in my personal opinion.

Aberrantly SD cards also comes in few different formats, sizes actually, standard, mini and very popular micro SD cards but unfortunately SD format has one limitation, its capacity which is limited only to 2 GB and 2GB definitely doesn’t sounds very impressive nowadays.

Therefore, to support the higher capacity needs, SD cards are now requiring a different design. At the 2006 International CES, the SD Card Association (SDA) announced their establishment of the SD Specification Version 2.0 for the SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity); making way for the SDHC to be the next generation SD Card.

Engineered to meet higher memory capacities, the SDHC will meet the higher requirements in a new generation technology, enabling SD cards to reach higher capacities - 4GB-32GB.
New electronic devices that will utilize SDHC memory cards include audio/video and telecommunications gadgets such as digital cameras, camcorders, mobile phones, computers, PDAs, plasma televisions, and many more.

Also the SD Association has created and defined 3 speed classes to help you identify speed and performance capabilities/minimum requirements of SDHC cards and their SDHC host products.

Now the bad part.. . unfortunately, the flagship Nokia phone, famous Nokia N95 comes with support for standard SD format only and therefore we can’t use cards larger than 2 GB.

Mainly its due to a different file system used by the new SDHC cards, they aren't recognizable by legacy SD devices, so its impossible use them in existing devices, even my card reader with latest drivers still can’t recognize these cards.

From other hand, considering all above facts it seams that support for larger cards are software related only and theoretically it is possible to get support for larger cards with upcoming firmware version although I’m not sure either. You see, its possible that the part of software code which is responsible for SD cards isn’t affected via the firmware update because it is stored in different chip area.

So, once again, I would like to suggest to all possible N95 owners to think twice before spending any money and investing in 4GB microSD cards.

It's better to just sit and wait for now and if you really need more than 2GB of memory than you should think of buying a couple relatively cheap 2GB cards which isn’t soo unhandy solution considering that phone features hot-swap memory card slot.