Little, little buggers. M2 usability issues.
Wednesday, November 7. 2007
August this year I bought myself a pretty new phone. A S/O/N/Y P1i, not the smallest phone, but a smart one with touch screen, and loads of interesting applications. Of course I need a lot of memory in this phone, to store a map of Europe for navigation, to have pictures to show my friends, and to listen to loads of mp3s. The phone came with a 512MB Sony Memory Stick M2, surely not too much memory for all those things. And Memory Stick M2... I've got plenty of SD cards, even a spare 2GB one, but well, Sony had decided to have their own format 
So I got myself a bigger 4GB card, probably 2GB would have done the trick, but since I had to buy a new card anyway...
I've got this beautiful docking station, which connects the phone to my PC, and the M2 card can be addressed as a drive through it. But the speed is really depressing, less than 1MB/sec. That means it would take 1-2 hours to fill the whole card!!! How can those engineers equip the beautiful phone with such a slow interface???
But of course there is a workaround, inserting the M2 into my memory card reader (of course I need that special adapter from M2 - MS Pro Duo first), I can access it with a maximum speed between 3-4MB/sec. But there is still a problem - the cards eject mechanism and the cards size! So far I have dropped the tiny card countless times and had to search for it, since it tends to disappear in disorderly environment. After one of those incidents at Vlogeurope07 even a video was created, to document the problems. Do any of those product creators think about usability?
