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- Visor & Deluxe (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=1)
-- cf ? hmmmm (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=9086)

I just went through the internet looking for cf cards ... the current cf springboard project apears to be progressing well.. and I noticed the that 2 meg compact flash cards are really cheap.... I mean really really cheap. Like 3-4 dollars minus the cost of shipping... if there is a world wide shortage shouldnt it be more expensive ? And more importaintly howcome the prism and platnum dont have any flash ? if flash mem is so short how come NEW cf is so cheap?

This is probably because there is not much demand for the smaller capacity cards. A 4mb card in my Kodak camera would only hold about 24 photos... not much when you're traveling and aren't near a computer. I think most people are buying 32mb and larger these days.

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God bless America, my home sweet home...

True, but I think what he is talking about is that if he can get a 2 meg flash CF for cheap then why can't Handspring use flash. However in response to this I think its hard to figure out by looking at CF flash why its so expensive to put flash in a Handspring model. Maybe its need to be faster or a different form chip. I have no idea I'm just throwing stuff out here. But it does make you wonder about this shortage and expense that the manufacturers are claiming.

Visorholic

CF flash is different

Also, keep in mind that the flash chips used in CF cards are different from the type of flash chips that are in the Palm units.

CF cards use serial access flash. You have access it serially - you can't just hop to an address in flash and read out one byte. This makes the chips less costly.

Palm PDAs use full parallel access flash chips. These cost more.

This is why the Handspring Backup Module costs $40 (serial access) and the Handspring Flash Moddule costs $80 (parallel access), even though they both have 8MB of flash in them.

Also the cheap 2MB and 4MB CF cards are flooding the market because people are either selling their old cards because they bought new 32MB cards, and because no one really wants such a small amount of memory when you can get 32MB and 64MB cards that store many more photos and much more MP3 music. Small demand and large supply = low cost.

Possible to hack a backup Module?

Is it possible to hack a Backup Module so that instead of doing only backups, you can save/access other data on it?

Perhaps it would be possible only to patch the backup app itself to make it into a file mover?