sd

Hacking or rooting the Barnes & Noble Nook Color has become a commercial venture for some, and that has plenty of Android enthusiasts calling foul.

In recent days, folks on eBay have started selling hacks for the Nook Color preinstalled on microSD cards, which start around $60 for 4GB cards and work their way upward. Installing one of the cards in the Nook Color's microSD slot allows users to override Barnes & Noble's "closed" Android-based Nook firmware with an open Android system that supports running a multitude of Android apps. "Modders" have been "porting" various "rooted" versions … Read more

As I sit here at 33,000 feet, watching my kids watch "How to Train Your Dragon" on my iPad, I'm struck by several thoughts.

First, in-flight Wi-Fi is just plain awesome. Second, coach seats were made for Netbooks, not laptops. The sardine-can contortions I'm enduring right now are just plain painful.

Third, buying high-definition (HD) movies or TV shows from iTunes is a waste of money--if you're planning to watch them solely on your iPad.

See, many users make the mistake of thinking that standard-definition (SD) videos are intended for iPhones and iPods, while … Read more

I continue to be fan of Eye-Fi memory cards, which wirelessly beam photos from your digital camera to your PC and/or an online service like Flickr or Facebook.

I'm not, however, a fan of their high prices. Dropping a hundred bucks on a 4GB SD card--even one with built-in Wi-Fi--is not my idea of a good deal.

Here's a better one: Today only, Best Buy outlet store Cowboom has the 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video SD card for $29.99, plus $5 for shipping. (You may also be on the hook for sales tax.) This same card lists … Read more

Announced about a year ago, the SD Card Association's SD 3.0 specification has yet to gain much traction. Panasonic and Toshiba both announced UHS-I SDHC products last September, with Toshiba claiming ultrafast write speeds of up to 80MB per second. But those cards have yet to materialize. At CES 2011, Kingston announced a new series of UHS-I cards, unfortunately dubbed UltimateXX, with a claimed 35MBps write speed, which are slated to be available this month. SanDisk now ups the ante, expanding its Extreme Pro line of flash cards from CompactFlash to SDHC, with the momentarily fastest spec of … Read more

Those who lived through the days of xD card vs. Memory Stick vs. CompactFlash vs. Secure Digital may think people need a new flash memory card format like we need a hole in our heads. Who, after all, has a burning desire to upgrade the 9-in-1 flash card reader to a 10-in-1 model?

An established industry standards group, JEDEC, has a new format it hopes will catch on, though.

The group already took over standardization of the MultiMediaCard specification that's chiefly relevant today hidden away inaccessibly in its embedded form, EMMC, that's used under the covers of various … Read more

The SD Association announced a new interface for flash memory cards today that triples data transfer speeds.

The faster SD card specification was expected since the group started previewing it in September. But more unusually for the consortium, the SD Association also announced an e-book specification at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"Our new e-Book application...opens broad consumer access to e-book content, and turns billions of existing SD mobile phones and devices into e-readers," Norm Frentz, chairman of the SD Association, said in a statement. "SD continues to evolve its capabilities to support voracious consumer demand for portable movies, television broadcasts, high-definition home videos, and now full-color books."

It's not yet clear who among e-book reader makers, publishers, or other companies are on board with the new specification, but two partners showing eBook support at CES are Toshiba and Sharp, the association said. Such partnerships will be important to its success, though, and there already are other e-book formats, such as ePub.

But eBook won't live in isolation. "The association plans to support popular external formats like ePublish, CPS, XMDF and ".book" formats in the near future," said SD Association communications director Kevin Schader. And to keep content publishers happy, it's free to use and supports copy protection. … Read more

Lexar Media, one of the premium-brand flash memory card makers, will introduce its first SDXC cards later this quarter with two high-end models geared for professionals, a 64GB card for $500 and a 128GB card for $700.

The 128GB model illustrates the narrowing gap between the SD lineage and a rival format popular among professionals, CompactFlash, which tops out at 64GB for mainstream brands. But while SDXC might be a step ahead in capacity--at least when it comes to announced products--CompactFlash leads in a different domain, data transfer speed.

Each of Lexar's new SDXC cards, with a 133X speed … Read more

Viewing photos on your iPad is a beautiful thing. Getting photos onto your iPad: not so much.

The traditional method requires copying snapshots from your camera to your PC, then from your PC to your iPad. That's one irksome extra step, and not exactly practical if you're traveling.

Hence Apple's iPad Camera Connection Kit, which for $29 gives you two dongles: one for reading SD media, another for connecting your camera directly via USB.

It's bad enough you have to pack a dongle at all, but two of them? Bleh. That's why I'm jazzed … Read more

In the flash-memory format wars, Secure Digital has vanquished xD Card and Memory Stick. SD, as it's known, is supported by everything from Apple laptops to Panasonic 3D videocameras.

But CompactFlash, a rival flash-card format that prevails in high-end SLRs from Canon, Nikon, and Sony, is holding out. More than that: its backers are developing a high-performance successor. Nikon, Sony, and memory card maker SanDisk have proposed that the CompactFlash Association standardize a sequel that can transfer data at a rate of 500MB per second and reach eventual capacities of 6TB.

"This next-generation format is expected to be … Read more