A couple of micro-SD questions..

[IncredibleMe]

Ok so I had some gift cards from Best Buy so I went to get a 16GB micro for my Dinc. I went to the cell phone department and they only had one left - it was on sale for $69.99. Works fine but was later looking on Amazon and saw what I thought was the same exact card for like $29. Hmmm... but then I looked further down in a search and saw that the SanDisk "mobile" microSD card was $78. I looked at the packaging for the card I bought at Best Buy and it also says "mobile." I'm assuming they make different micro cards.. one for mobile phones and one for other electronic devices? Are they shaped differently? Do you absolutely have to use a "mobile" micro card for a cell phone?

My other question is - when I put my new micro card into my card reader, it fit a little more snuggly then I would prefer. The 2GB card that came with my Dinc did not fit so snuggly. Is there a difference in width? Should I get a new card reader? I've had my current one for a couple years.

Many thanks in advance!!

 

[andrew_ja]

The only technical differences with microSD card is capacity and Class (which is the MB/s of the card).

There are differences in what they are categorized, but it is only semantics (1MB to 4 GB is Standard SD, 4 GB to 32 GB is SDHC and so on)

"Mobile" sounds like a marketing term.

The size is most likely due to different companies using different molds for the plastic.

 

[kmo]

I bought my 16gb Sandisk Class 2 microSDHC Flash Memory Card for like $30. delivered. There is a huge discrepancy in pricing. Amazon and Sandisk have always done right be me....the card works great by the way.

 

[IncredibleMe]

Terrific. Sounds like I just spent $40 more than I needed to.

 

[Fudsey]

Terrific. Sounds like I just spent $40 more than I needed to.

Like andrew said, it may be the difference in class for the one you bought and the one you saw for less, Class 2 is cheaper than a Class 6.

 

[EdisonCheug]

Terrific. Sounds like I just spent $40 more than I needed to.

i'm in the same situation, and i don't think mine's Class 6...

 

[jnmilli352]

I think it is a marketing ploy I have seen cards that say HD,high speed,or mobile it is all crap. If it fits it works storage is storage, I bought a couple of 8G cards on sale at Wal-Mart for 10$ each and they work the same as a 40$ one just alittle less truer actual storage space is about 7.5 G but still cheap

 

[IncredibleMe]

Terrific. Sounds like I just spent $40 more than I needed to.

i'm in the same situation, and i don't think mine's Class 6...

I actually had an online chat with a SanDisk rep and it was very enlightening. I told him I bought a "mobile" 16GB card and that it said so on the packaging. He said it should have a 10 year warranty and be class 4 speed. Well mine has a 5 year warranty and is class 2. It's almost like they took a regular 16GB micro card and stuck it in a "mobile" box. He asked me to send pics of the packaging and the actual card which I did. Crazy though - I paid $69 at Best Buy and it was on sale! I scanned the barcode on the back and on the web I can find the same card for 25 bucks. $45 difference? Really??? Jeez...

 

[andrew_ja]

I think it is a marketing ploy I have seen cards that say HD,high speed,or mobile it is all crap. If it fits it works storage is storage, I bought a couple of 8G cards on sale at Wal-Mart for 10$ each and they work the same as a 40$ one just alittle less truer actual storage space is about 7.5 G but still cheap

"HD" is actually part of the microSD standard. microSD is up to 2GB. Since the chips that they use can be so dense, they started microSDHC. A different firmware version would need to be on the device to use these cards. The limit right now is 32 gigabytes. There is a third, really dense version called microSDXC (eXtended Capacity), but so few devices actually use it. These cards can go up to 2 terrabytes currently.

The missing storage space comes from two places. First is formatting. Almost everything is manufactured and shipped unformatted (and if it is shipped formatted, I am willing to bet the capacity is before they formatted it, anyway). This has always been a problem with storage. A 3 1/2" diskette never truly had 1.44MB in it. A 100GB hard drive never has 100GBs of space. It is because the storage device needs to be split into chunks of data that can be stored. Parts of the writable space is needed for that.

Also, companies will take the number of bytes, and divide it by a factor of 1000. When, in actuality, data is measured in factors of 1024. The smaller the capacity is, the less noticeable. But, once you get into the mid to upper gigabytes, and especially in terrabytes, it becomes rather misleading with what they slap on the sticker.

 

[jnmilli352]

I know what your saying Andrew but my 8G sandisk has about 200mb more than the cheap one out of the box. As far as the HD thing your talking about models I'm talking about High Definition have not seen any of this on sandisk, mostly off brands to make people think there getting something special