Windows Phone 7 and Removable Storage

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/10/12/windows-phone-7-and-removable-storage/' target='_blank'>http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010...ovable-storage/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"So, there's been some confusion around Windows Phone 7 and its support of removable/expandable storage. As is so often the case, this confusion comes from Microsoft: The company told me specifically (and repeatedly) that the OS would not support this. But it sort of does. Here's how it works."</em></p><p>Here's the bottom line: if you really want a device with expandable storage, you should buy one with an exposed microSD card slot - but not all devices will have them. I don't understand why Microsoft didn't just make it part of the Chassis 1 specification; I think it would have been fine to have the cards be non-removable except as part of a hard reset. You buy the phone, you put in whatever size card you want, boot up the phone, and never touch the card again. Makes sense, no?</p>

[Twain]

I think it would have been fine to have the cards be non-removable except as part of a hard reset. You buy the phone, you put in whatever size card you want, boot up the phone, and never touch the card again. Makes sense, no?</p>
That makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe the problem is that there is a whole generation of buyers like me who bought phones with a slot that they could choose to optionally fill with whatever capacity memory card they desired. Now, with WP7, instead of me deciding that I want to carry around 16 MB of my own pictures, music, videos, whatever, Microsoft is going to decide that I only need to carry 8 MB. Oh and forget about when 32 MB or 64 MB cards hit the market and I want to migrate to a card with greater storage. I can't migrate without a hard reset of my phone. WTF???

Of course this all makes sense when you realize that Microsoft wants to put only a token sized memory card in every phone so that you'll have no choice but to place all of your personal data in "the cloud" where they can have access to a new revenue stream from the monthly payments you'll be forking over for storage you used to have on your own phone!

[benjimen]

This storage-gate is going to do nothing but detract from WP7. It's like they wanted to be fully iPhone-ish, but couldn't quite commit so they came up with this harebrained idea. From a consumer perspective, it's very odd -- some devices can be expanded, some can't -- those that can will be hard-reset when you put the card in, so you can't just put another one in if you've filled up storage with pictures or something. You can't copy media onto a card and put it in your device, if you have one of the devices that takes cards...

It's all in keeping with Microsoft's overall performance in the mobility marketplace :(

[Gerard]

One of the top few reasons NOT to get an iPhone, for myself at least, is the lack of a card slot. Ditto the iPad. And so naturally the same applies with WP7. Notwithstanding the social networking based marketing campaigns, which seem to indicate a device primarily designed for the blog/chatter crowd, the hardware specs actually aren't bad at all. But this confusing hit-and-miss, maybe you can hack it, maybe you can't sort of nonsense can only hurt market perception for the new gadgets.

Or maybe not? Considering that Apple mysteriously continues to positively ROB people of about $100 per memory-doubling from model to model, with buyers positively gleeful about the technological marvel being provided (just think, a whole 8GB extra memory for a mere $100!) when any idiot can find a 16GB microSD card for $49 at the local Best Buy, well, it seems the market is still ripe for the plucking. Go for it Microsoft. Apple has paved your road for you in this regard as well.

[Jason Dunn]

That makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe the problem is that there is a whole generation of buyers like me who bought phones with a slot that they could choose to optionally fill with whatever capacity memory card they desired....I can't migrate without a hard reset of my phone. WTF???

Hold on a second there. :)

We've known for a long time now that Microsoft wasn't allowing external storage cards, and for some people, that's a deal breaker. Fair enough. For me, and I suspect many others, once you put the memory card in the phone, you just leave it there. I have an 8 GB microSD card in my HD2 that I literally haven't touched since the day I put it in. So the thought of being able to do the same thing with Windows Phone 7 instead of having no secondary storage at all sounds quite excellent to me, even if it means a hard reset.

Would I prefer to have removable storage like we have now? Yes...but, and this is important, right now we don't have merged storage. As in, when you add a storage card to a WM 6.5 phone, the OS sees it is a separate pool of storage. With Windows Phone 7, it sees the storage as part of one big pool - which is way easier, and faster for it to use. And guess what? You can only get that if you have a card that the customer can't remove and completely screw up the whole OS. That's always been the problem with storage cards: clueless users take 'em out then wonder why things stop working.

Of course this all makes sense when you realize that Microsoft wants to put only a token sized memory card in every phone so that you'll have no choice but to place all of your personal data in "the cloud" where they can have access to a new revenue stream from the monthly payments you'll be forking over for storage you used to have on your own phone!

Well that's kind of a strange tin-foil hat theory. :) Which cloud services that Microsoft is using for Windows Phone 7 are they charging for again?

[Gerard]

While I appreciate that babysitting noobs is an important element in marketing a platform, it seems a bit odd to limit a device's usability in the name of said babysitting. One could attempt the same argument for SD slots on notebooks. In fact Apple does exactly this with their lower-priced notebooks (lower-priced being around $2,000 or less), eliminating the annoyance of an SD slot for those not 'professional' enough to handle them.

But I'd argue for a removable storage card for a couple of reasons. One has already been mentioned here - new, larger scale cards come out all the time, and it's annoying not being able to upgrade storage capacity to take advantage of same. If I could grab a 1TB SD card for my netbook for around $100 right now it wouldn't take even a second thought, it's a no-brainer that more onboard storage is a good thing.

The second reason is related to the historical un-reliability of synchronization with Microsoft. I gave up many years ago on transferring files back and forth between Windows Mobile devices and my PCs via Activesync. Failures to connect costing many hours of struggle with ports and firewalls and still usually ending in failures... corrupted files and/or storage media thanks to glitches in Activesync... then finally the outlawing of Wi-Fi Activesync for newer device OS versions... And of the 3 WM phones I've used (O2 XDA Atom, HTC Touch Elfin, and now HTC Kaiser), only the Elfin could be read predictably as an external USB drive. No matter what sort of software tricks I've tried or which brand of cables, the Kaiser simply will not maintain an un-corrupted connection to a PC as a USB drive. It worked now and then, for minutes at a time, then just didn't. Same for the old XDA Atom. And forget about even trying such things with older PDA type PPCs. So popping out the SD or now microSD card and using a card reader to transfer large files such as movies of folders full of music. I mean seriously, why have a big storage card (or built-in storage for that matter) if transferring files is going to depend on a buggy connection?

If Microsoft has indeed completely fixed file transfer between host PC and phone, great, I salute them. So far not a lot of focus seems to go to this question in discussions of WP7. Have they actually made a fool-proof protocol for fast, large file transfers? Can users be assured of corruption-free file movement between devices? If file transfers are to be done through the 'cloud' or similar off-site conduit, can users be assured of file security? It would take a lot of proof for most experienced in the vagaries of Activesync and the almost equally buggy device center software to become convinced that WP7 would not need removable storage for file copying.

If these phones are being billed as standalone, that's a whole different kettle of fish. If users are not to synch data at all, but rather to use cellular bandwidth to access it directly, then this leads to questions around data plan fees with the various carriers... and I can see Canadian users at least being rather upset if that were the case, considering how much most are expected to pay for cellular data here.

[Fritzly]

With reference to:

"We've known for a long time now that Microsoft wasn't allowing external storage cards, and for some people, that's a deal breaker."

The use of "some" seems a little bit optimistic to me, especially when Carriers will raise data fees thanks to these "all stored in the cloud" and now "All synced through the cloud only" mantras. And yes so far MS is not charging anything for the services but tomorrow?

As for:
"Would I prefer to have removable storage like we have now? Yes...but, and this is important, right now we don't have merged storage. As in, when you add a storage card to a WM 6.5 phone, the OS sees it is a separate pool of storage. With Windows Phone 7, it sees the storage as part of one big pool - which is way easier, and faster for it to use."

Respectable opinion but many people, me included, would disagree: one of the first golden rules I learned about computers was to always keep OS and programs separated form data.
All my computers are set in this way; C:\ OS and Programs, D:\Data, E:\OS Image and Data backup. Of course I also have backup on removable storage. Keep everything together is a perfect receipt for trouble.
Btw yes my n HD2 all the data stored in the SD card too.

[Gerard]

Btw yes my n HD2 all the data stored in the SD card too.

Ditto for me. I've not kept anything important besides PIM databases (no real choice there) in main memory of my phones/PDAs for many years. And thanks to PIMBackup and routine backups to the card, as well as regular cloning of card data to external hard drives via the netbook, no system failures on these devices have cost me anything significant in years. The thought all the information I want in my phone trapped in fallible device memory, subject to the whims and vagaries of Microsoft-sanctioned data transfer protocols, that's just scary.

[Jason Dunn]

The use of "some" seems a little bit optimistic to me, especially when Carriers will raise data fees thanks to these "all stored in the cloud" and now "All synced through the cloud only" mantras. And yes so far MS is not charging anything for the services but tomorrow?

You, and several others, are talking as though desktop sync for media doesn't exist; as though you're expected to sync all your photos/music/videos via the cloud. That's not the case: you'll connect your WP7 phone to the Zune desktop software, and transfer music, videos, and photos back and forth. I can't think of anything media-wise that would need to go via the cloud.

PIM stuff - calender, contacts, email - is all cloud based now, yes, but compared to media synching PIM stuff is bandwidth light. I really don't understand the problem here.

And, based on discussions with Microsoft and a lot of other MVPs, the average smartphone owner rarely, if ever, takes the memory card out (and I count myself in that group). I think there's only a small % of users that would actively want to take the memory card in and out. Here in this forum, that % is much higher, so it seems like a bigger problem than it is. But, unfortunately for you guys, Microsoft has chosen to target this phone at the broader market.

...one of the first golden rules I learned about computers was to always keep OS and programs separated form data.
All my computers are set in this way; C:\ OS and Programs, D:\Data, E:\OS Image and Data backup. Of course I also have backup on removable storage. Keep everything together is a perfect receipt for trouble.

I used to the same thing back with Windows XP - but that was years ago. There's zero reason to continue with the same approach now - if you have a hard drive failure, all your careful partitioning is going to be moot. Data and OS isolation was the smart thing to do when your OS would become corrupted at the drop of a hat - Windows XP was great at that - but both Vista and Windows 7 are much more robust.

Anyway, this is getting rather off topic, but I think the reality is that some people don't like change, don't want to change, and will refuse to change their ways while the rest of the world moves on. I see that in this thread, but no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy a WP7 phone.

[Jason Dunn]

The thought all the information I want in my phone trapped in fallible device memory, subject to the whims and vagaries of Microsoft-sanctioned data transfer protocols, that's just scary.

I know this won't make you any less grumpy - because that's what you enjoy - but in all the years of using the Zune software to transfer photos, music, and very large videos, I've never had a single corrupted photos, music or video file. I think there's much ado about nothing here.

[Gerard]

I know this won't make you any less grumpy - because that's what you enjoy - but in all the years of using the Zune software to transfer photos, music, and very large videos, I've never had a single corrupted photos, music or video file. I think there's much ado about nothing here.

Much ado about nothing for you, and that's great. My wife has a small Zune, don't know what generation, but it has a little colour screen and can play movies - though she never uses that function, just uses MP3s for running, hour-long electronica tracks she customises for correct tempo in Audacity. It's a fairly minimal usage pattern for her, as she only adds or removes a track once in a while, might sometimes go a month or more without changing anything. But the Zune software has twice in the past two years automagically deleted some in one case, all in the other. She's completely at a loss as to explain this behavior. She's just connected, changed something, later disconnected the Zune once charged to take it on a run... and there's nothing there to listen to. She's no tech wizard, but as I said, she's at least somewhat familiar with running fairly sophisticated programs like Audacity. The Zune software confuses us both however, as it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. She's kept it updated to current versions always. The device itself seems to work great, she's actually very happy with the hardware. The lack of an in-track bookmarking function, which she got very used to while 'borrowing' our daughter's iPod Nano, is something of an irritation... but that's way off topic I know.

You say that storing PIM data 'in the cloud' is something about which there ought to be no real fuss. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be comfortable letting someone else manage your contacts storage. Many people are not. We're in a transitional phase and I appreciate that. Many people are going to Facebook, Gmail, and other resources to store and share data. But for my 800+ contacts and my appointments I prefer to keep both storage and control of that data local, not away in some managed server where I have no real control over security or stability. In this case it's not about bandwidth, as you say, that is relatively trivial for PIM data. It's about privacy and control, and not wanting to relinquish either to Microsoft nor to anyone else. Those contacts aren't just my data, they're information about hundreds of people who don't necessarily grant permission for me to store said information 'in the cloud.'

I'm hardly prepared for the legal ramifications should some criminal employee in another country decide to sell such information to spammers, for example, or worse, to use it for identity theft. Control isn't about grumpiness or any other sort of attitude Jason, it's just about control, a legitimate concern these days, when data theft is all around us, and the consequences can be grave indeed.

[Jason Dunn]

Much ado about nothing for you, and that's great. My wife has a small Zune, don't know what generation, but it has a little colour screen and can play movies...But the Zune software has twice in the past two years automagically deleted some in one case, all in the other. She's completely at a loss as to explain this behavior.

You're seriously complaining about a once-a-year bug? :eek: Come on, software isn't perfect - it has bugs - and weird things happen now and then. It sucks that it happens, but I can't think of a single app that NEVER has issues. The Zune software is among the most reliable I've found, even if it's not 100% perfect.

You say that storing PIM data 'in the cloud' is something about which there ought to be no real fuss. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be comfortable letting someone else manage your contacts storage. Many people are not.

Actually, I sort of agree with you - although personally I use hosted Exchange, so all my PIM data is up in the cloud, I just access it via desktop Outlook 2010 - I feel Microsoft made the wrong choice by focusing solely on the cloud. It will leave some users out in the cold, which is unfortunate. If you're using desktop Outlook, you're pretty much SOL.

[Gerard]

My daughter's now-ancient iPod Nano (going on 4 years now maybe) has been 'fed' reliably using SharePod. Before that she used YamiPod for a few years, until finding it didn't get along with her new Macbook, but there were no losses, no bothersome glitches in all that time. For my part I've never had an issue with XnView in editing thousands upon thousands of images over the past 8 years or so. The software just works, and the recent versions provide ever-deeper functionality, still freeware, still reliable. nPOPuk gets my mail, keeps my mail, sends my mail. As I help develop this program I do test a lot of beta versions for new functionalities, and in those there are rare glitches, but in hundreds of test builds I've not lost one piece of email in over 4 years. Reliable software isn't as rare as you seem to find, but of course that depends on which softwares you run. I tend to use stuff which works better than average, uninstalling anything which does not. So Outlook hasn't been on my PC for a number of years... lost too many contacts, had too many doubled mysteriously, forcing searches for possible fixes. Microsoft's OS versions I'm more or less stuck with, owing to addictions to certain programs only available for Windows. And in fact I am VERY pleased with Windows 7 Ultimate N on my Asus netbook. It's been a rock. So what I'd like to see is Microsoft attempting similar reliability in their synch software. From what I've seen with Zune, that's not quite it. Losing data once per year may not seem a big deal to you, but I don't have time for that kind of junk, the hours upon hours one must dedicate to finding fixes, if at all.

Windows Mobile running standalone (with swappable storage card for keeping files in synch and making backups) suits my usage just fine. My reason for protesting in this thread regarding non-removable storage in WP7 is simple; it is one of a handful of reasons not to make the jump to this platform. Others being the heavy emphasis around social networking which I find irrelevant, the lack of access to open source/freeware applications (unless such developers decide to cough up cash for the 'right' to distribute through the MS store), and of course the lack of access to 'legacy' WM software, much of which is not being re-defined for WP7, and for at least the first year or two, similar functionalities not being available for WP7. Starting over with a new platform could be attractive, if that platform were supported by more than just flashy media and chat apps. But going back to the spartan software selection we had with the PPC in 2000 doesn't really appeal when there are better ways to spend one's time than playing catch-up.

[Fritzly]

PIM stuff - calender, contacts, email - is all cloud based now, yes, but compared to media synching PIM stuff is bandwidth light. I really don't understand the problem here.



Anyway, this is getting rather off topic, but I think the reality is that some people don't like change, don't want to change, and will refuse to change their ways while the rest of the world moves on. I see that in this thread, but no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy a WP7 phone.

I am very well aware that through Zune I can sync my media to the desktop; my concerns are about Office and Onenote docs; in the real World many people and companies do not want or cannot do this.

You are right on one thing though: I got my first electronic PIM in 1982, hardly the description of someone who follows the rest of the World.....

[Jason Dunn]

I am very well aware that through Zune I can sync my media to the desktop; my concerns are about Office and Onenote docs; in the real World many people and companies do not want or cannot do this.

I concur - the lack of an easy way to sync files to the device really sucks. I'm hoping someone will create a Dropbox client for WP7!

[Richard76]

I do not consider myself an advanced user, although I have flashed ROM's and the such. I would say more of an intermediate user that uses my devices to about 80% of their capabilities. The biggest issue I have with WP7 is the fact that M$ has changed course considerably with this new strategy. Too much in my opinion.

The main reason that I have preferred Windows Mobile over every other platform since my first WinCE device back in the early 90's, is FLEXIBILITY. Poke, prod, customize, swap storage cards etc.

Nuff said, I need to go and have a good cry.

P.S. Perhaps I will work on a nice eulogy when I have some time.

[mas98110]

I don't text or gab on the phone. I use my hacked Wizard like a laptop and have 8 2GB storage cards that I was looking forward to selling on eBay after I got the new T-mobile HTC-7. This no-swap SD card thing is a deal killer for me.

My new plan is to wait till the give away the HTC HD2 with the McDonald's Happy Meal and hack that phone with a smooth ROM.
Since my business takes me between Seattle & Los Angeles, and all my data is confidential by law. I can't risk loading it on MS Cloud.

What a bummer!

[Gerard]

That is a really good point, the secure data comment. With any newer WM device, it's possible to go into Settings > System > Encryption and check the box which encrypts any and all data written to the storage card. This option has a warning, that encrypted data will ONLY be readable from that card within this same phone - which seems a bit risky to me in case of phone damage - and so it should be first backed up to an alternate secure location.

For my part, I've trusted Resco Explorer's encryption for some years, and before that used Lucifer. Not much in either case, mostly just to see if it works as I don't have anything secret to store... but having done a review once for pocketnow.com on Lucifer it seemed natural to test other options for file encryption. Resco's uncompressed and compressed file encryption seems quite solid. I experienced corruption of data in one instance some years ago, that's all.

But for a business/government agency user, having an encryptable, removable storage card seems a good idea. Maybe that's one of the motivators for MS preserving limited support for WM devices, as such agencies might be a bit leary of handing out devices without the encrypted card data option.