Android OS !

For the Nexus 7 they are more reasonable. Only $50 extra from 16GB to 32GB. But all of that would not be necessary if they only put a micro SD card slot in. Attaching a stick or anything via OTG apparently does not work.

Which Samsung do you have - is that the one similar to the Nexus 7 and costs around $350 ??

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. It was a bit pricey at the time. And it seems to have the Qualcom duo core and not the Tegra 3 CPU. But it has the advantage of the card slot. Did they ever upgrade it to 4.1 or 4.2 ??

whs said:

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. It was a bit pricey at the time. And it seems to have the Qualcom duo core and not the Tegra 3 CPU. But it has the advantage of the card slot. Did they ever upgrade it to 4.1 or 4.2 ??

I originally bought it in the spring of this year, and paid $350 for it. Then about a month later, I was bored with it, and traded it away for an imported 64GB Sony mp3 player that cost my buddy about the same amount of money.

Fast forward up to about a month ago, same buddy is in trouble with the wife for spending too much (which I'm sure a few of the members here can relate to) so he PM'd me one day and I ended up getting it back from him for $200, with two protective cases for it, still in immaculate condition, and having receives an over-the-air update to 4.04 at long last (it originally came with 3.2 Honeycomb).

You are correct, it has a dual-core chip running at 1.2Mhz. The ICS upgrade, from what I have read, made a noticeable difference in responsiveness. I certainly have no complaints with its performance. The card slot is handy....at the moment, mine is filled with movies and concert videos, and I have about 5GB of the essential music on the internal memory.

I don't know at this point if it will be upgraded to a newer Android than the current 4.04, but even if it stays as is, it still runs well enough to satisfy me.

That was a long Odyssey for the device. I am glad your happy with it.

cytherian said:

Apple tech aficionados say that Apple embeds the memory because it works faster than a docked micro SDHC. There's also no overhead to deal with add/removal of the storage, and possible system faults if its removed while being depended upon (e.g. app installed on it or file I/O taking place). But I've seen performance shoot outs between the iPhone and Android phones, which included file I/O... and there wasn't an appreciable difference.

That can be a problem for system files, but does not matter for user files.

In Windows you have a similar case when you use a USB stick for ready boost. The system writes the pages on the stick but also on the HDD as backup - just in case you pull the stick in the middle of the operation.

cytherian said:

Apple tech aficionados say that Apple embeds the memory because it works faster than a docked micro SDHC. There's also no overhead to deal with add/removal of the storage, and possible system faults if its removed while being depended upon (e.g. app installed on it or file I/O taking place). But I've seen performance shoot outs between the iPhone and Android phones, which included file I/O... and there wasn't an appreciable difference.

Google's mentality behind leaving out a removeable SD slot in the Nexus devices (not sure about the likes of HTC etc) is because it can confuse users as to where their files are when the phone has multiple storage locations i.e. there will be the internal storage for all system, data, some user files, and then the SD card has user files, some app files, and from Android 2.2, data files.

Maybe it's just me taking knowledge for granted, but I'm not sure why a user would get confused. Unless the user roots their phone, they can't see any of the storage past the SD card, and everything a user would use is on the sd card anyway (photos, music, videos).