The Windows Phone 7 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 20, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft
- Mobile
Expandable Storage via microSD
Microsoft supports expandable storage on Windows Phone 7 devices. If an OEM chooses to do so, it can implement a microSD card slot for additional storage. This is similar to what Google allows with Android, however the similarity ends here.
Windows Phone creates a JBOD span across your internal NAND and any NAND on microSD. It’s all treated as one contiguous address space, like a large hard drive or SSD. The benefit is you don’t have to manage where you put your apps, music, movies or photos. The downside is you can’t just remove/replace the microSD card in your phone.
The OS is obviously stored in a known location, however data is written linearly across both internal and microSD NAND. Your phone will still boot if you remove or swap out the microSD card, but you’ll be greeted with an error.
If you remove the card and attempt to read off of it on your Mac/PC you’ll quickly realize that you can’t. By removing the card you effectively break the file system. Microsoft provides you with a couple of other options to get data to/from the phone (which I’ll get to later) so you don’t have to rely on swapping microSDs.
You aren’t stuck with that original microSD card however. If you do a factory restore with a new microSD card installed the OS will format across it and you’ll be good to go. Obviously you’ll have to re-download all of your apps and sync all of your files but it does work.
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wharris1 - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Web site is great; now I need to read articledeputc26 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Where are the actual load times (in seconds) for web pages? Synthetics never tell the whole picture... seems like you might be embarrassed for WP7 on this front ;)GoSharks - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Are there supposed to be images in this article?jimhsu - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Article seems to be half done as Anand makes a huge number of edits. Guess that's normal.SelesGames - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
I see images just fine.Btw, I don't know whether any app reviews will be done, but for anyone who has access to a phone, check out some of our apps. Search for "Seles Games" to see all our apps, or check out any of the apps we have demoed here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/aemami99
Mumrik - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
So you decided to advertise in the Anandtech comments... Classy move.Termie - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
The HTC Surround page seems to be missing, or at least it's not coming up when I click on the link to that page.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Images are incoming, please bare with us :)atmartens - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
"please bare with us :)"Skinny dipping? Or just streaking?
Zstream - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Do you know what the talk time is for the LG? It's not showing on the graph.