mercy mercy me
So PalmOne announced the latest in their Tungsten series yesterday, the T-5. The t-5 will (finally!) contain flash memory, and thus be recognized as a USB device on Windows/Linux. Something I wished I had a long time before USB thumbdrives became du jour.
This brings me to an interesting question. Take a look at the Wikipedia articles for flash memory, and more pertinently, to the keydrive entry. It says, and I quote
"Like all flash memory devices, keydrives can sustain only a limited number of write/erase cycles before failure. In normal use, mid-range keydrives currently on the market will support several million cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a keydrive as a hard drive to run software or an operating system.
So, how did Palm manage to overcome the limited write cycles problem ? Or are they just counting on people throwing out the $400 T-5s every few years ? Because I think I'll hang onto my trusty m515 for a while longer; thank you very much. Lower res screen, no fancy rotate screen feature, a lot less memory, still runs OS 4.1 instead of the 5.x series... but the m515 does everything I want. I don't want a digital camera, or a mp3 player in my PDA. Nor do I particularly want it in a cellphone (but that's a whole new blog entry right there: me vs cellphones).
Incidentally, the title is from a song by this guy.
This brings me to an interesting question. Take a look at the Wikipedia articles for flash memory, and more pertinently, to the keydrive entry. It says, and I quote
"Like all flash memory devices, keydrives can sustain only a limited number of write/erase cycles before failure. In normal use, mid-range keydrives currently on the market will support several million cycles, although write operations will gradually slow as the device ages. This should be a consideration when using a keydrive as a hard drive to run software or an operating system.
So, how did Palm manage to overcome the limited write cycles problem ? Or are they just counting on people throwing out the $400 T-5s every few years ? Because I think I'll hang onto my trusty m515 for a while longer; thank you very much. Lower res screen, no fancy rotate screen feature, a lot less memory, still runs OS 4.1 instead of the 5.x series... but the m515 does everything I want. I don't want a digital camera, or a mp3 player in my PDA. Nor do I particularly want it in a cellphone (but that's a whole new blog entry right there: me vs cellphones).
Incidentally, the title is from a song by this guy.
<< Home