Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ll recall, Apple had no qualms revealing the iPad Camera Connection Kit at its ‘Latest Creation‘ event back in January, but the solution seemingly dropped from the face of the Earth shortly thereafter. Even as cases, keyboards and all sorts of other iPad accessories surfaced for pre-order, the camera kit remained nowhere to be found. Over the weekend, the $29 adapter bundle finally found a home at the outfit’s website (with a “late April” ship date), offering users a pair of dongles to support USB and SD cards. Of course, one could easily argue that the iPad should have native support for both of these widely used formats without forcing users to lug around two extra peripherals, but if that were the case, this thing just wouldn’t be an Apple, now would it?

iPad Camera Connection Kit finally surfaces for pre-order, still absurdly overpriced originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink iLounge  |  Apple  | Email this | Comments

Two — no, three — things in life are sure: Death, taxes, and the fact that storage manufacturers will continue to cram ever-more ridiculous quantities of memory into tinier packages.

SanDisk announced a new 32-GB microSDHC card on Monday, effectively doubling the maximum storage capacity of the tiny, less-than-dime-sized memory chips found in many modern smartphones. This is the maximum capacity that the HC-format microSD cards can hold, so any further advances will have to wait until manufacturers start installing microSD-XC slots in their phones.

The advance means it is now possible to swallow an entire 7,000-song iTunes library, or 10 hours of uncompressed HD video, without gagging.

SanDisk says its new card will be available for purchase on its website starting Tuesday, and through retail channels shortly thereafter.

(Samsung announced a 32-GB microSD card earlier this year, but the card does not appear to be available to consumers yet.)

With a retail price of $200 and a weight of just 0.5 grams, you’ll want to be extra-careful with this minuscule memory chip, as it’s worth about 11 times its weight in gold.

To achieve the increased capacity, SanDisk did two things: Switch to a 32-nanometer production process, and stack eight memory chips vertically inside the microSD card.

The first change refers to the size of a typical memory component, which is now around 32nm, or about the same size as the circuits used in Intel’s latest Core i3 and Core i5 chips. Using smaller circuitry enables the company to cram more bits onto a wafer of silicon.

32nm X3 chip under an electron microscope that shows eight-die stack. This is an actual photo of a 32nm X3 card that was torn apart to show the layers of memory chips inside.

The second change is pure micromechanical engineering. Although a microSD card is only 1mm thick, including the plastic housing, SanDisk’s engineers have managed to squeeze a vertical stack of eight memory chips inside it. Each chip holds 4 GB of data, so altogether the stack holds 32 GB.

“You’re basically talking about an entire jukebox on a flash memory chip the size of your pinkie fingernail,” said SanDisk vice president Eric Bone.

SanDisk microSDHC Cards (product site)

SanDisk First to Ship 32 Gigabyte microSDHC Card (press release)

Photos courtesy SanDisk

Good news: if you thought the current CompactFlash 4.0 storage limit of 137 Gbytes was too restrictive, the new CF 5.0 standard should shatter that barrier for a good long time.

The CompactFlash 5.0 standard creates an upper boundary of 144 petabytes, an almost unfathomably high capacity of storage: almost 147,500 terabytes. One and two-terabyte hard drives are common, but 147,000? On a flash card? That will only be achieved in the far, far future.

The CompactFlash Association competes with the Secure Digital (SD) card, which has announced its own SDXC standard, taking capacity points up to 2 terabytes. Panasonic announced its first SDXC cards in January.

By day, the Airstash is a common, ordinary USB card reader. But by night, it dons the mantle of wireless connectivity, taking to the streets and sharing pictures an images in an ad-hoc, daredevil manner.

The Airstash looks much like a regular card reader, with a USB plug on one end and an SD card-shaped hole in the other. In between you can find a tiny, battery powered 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi router. Slot in a card and it can be reached wirelessly through the web browser of any Wi-Fi enabled computer or phone.

The design is simple, but the uses are manifold. You could use this to wirelessly copy photos from card to computer, but that, apart from saving you a USB port, is a little boring. What about carrying an extra 32GB of movies and music that can be streamed from the built-in server direct to your iPhone? Or creating a fully functional wireless network for sharing, well, anything? Because it uses vanilla Wi-Fi, it works with anything. And because it uses USB, it charges when you plug it into a spare port.

The product was shown last week at CES, and right now has neither a price or a shipping date (”available soon” is the only hint on the product page). If it is cheap, and if the battery in such a tiny case can last long enough to be useful, then this could be a very useful toy. And if it is given away at next
year’s CES in the same fashion as pen drives were at this year’s show, we’ll be very happy indeed.

Airstash product page [Airstash via Oh Gizmo!]

Just as CES is wrapping up, we managed to get some hands-on time with the AirStash wireless SD card reader, which is targeted at iPhone OS devices (but does work with other WiFi-enabled devices). Like many of the mysterious products from Vegas we have no price, release date or battery life, but what we do know now is that it’s indeed very light (1.5 ounces), fits nicely in our hands and supports up to 32GB SDHC cards. As for wireless connection the AirStash acts as a WiFi 802.11b/g access point — a cunning way to dodge the Apple dock connector license fees or the lack of Bluetooth profiles. Sadly, the prototype wasn’t working properly due to “some RF interference,” but as you can see above, the AirStash is accessed via a browser (UI design not final). Sure, this would mean you’d lose Internet connection via WiFi, but if the AirStash is cheap enough, then we’ll live with it. Let’s hope they hurry up with the release, though.

AirStash wireless SD card reader hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments