The first time I came across a memory card was with my first Palm-OS based PDA, the Sony Clie PEG-S300. This was Sony’s first Palm handheld, and it shipped with an 8MB Memory Stick, which was about the size of a stick of gum. This Sony 32MB Memory Stick looks almost identical to that first 8MB Memory Stick. Only a few years later I used a 128 MB Memory Stick with a Sony Clie NX60. A flash update allowed the use of the new Memory Stick PRO format which started at 256MB. From there the Memory Stick spun off into multiple variations (see the “Memory Stick” article in Wikipedia). Nowadays the Sony PSP uses the Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Pro Duo format.
Although the Sony memory Stick is produced by other manufacturers like Sandisk and Lexar, they are almost exclusively used in Sony branded digital cameras, PDAs, cellphones. The Sony VAIO line of personal computers includes Memory Stick slots.

When Sony pulled out of making Palm PDAs, I switched to Palm branded handhelds. These, and most Windows Mobile handhelds use the Secure Digital Card format. The postage-stamp sized Secure Digital Card format supports capacities from 8 MB to 2 GB. The SDHC card supports sizes from 4GB to 32GB (see the blog entry “SD, SDHC Cards, Say what?“).

There is just no space to go into the myriad of card formats here: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, miniSD, microSD and many other variants. Wikipedia’s “Comparison of memory cards” has an extensive table and comparison of memory card formats.

Posted on April 29th, 2008 by mervyn