[POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

As the title says:
should Jolla add SDxC compatibility for SD cards (hereby paying license fees to M$ from crowdfunds)?
The bold add is missing in above poll question, so please use this: ADD.

I am not going to explain or state here, this is just a poll!
Please see for information the original page and discussion in other thread (starting from roundabout here).

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

tfw no poll :(

edit: yay!

btw, linking to a page - bad idea, 39 pages in that thread for me, so it hasn't even started

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

keep calm, thread is published before poll can be edited :)

--
I linked into a page in the other thread cause there the discussion about that topic started and I did not want to repeat all that again, but you all are free to point out your most critical reasons here once more (briefly)

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Can you add POLL: to the title?

"POLL: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal"

and add a verb in the poll question please :D

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

"I do not mind them to add it" is bad English (should probably be "I do not mind if they add it", sounds like you translated literally from another language). Relatedly, you don't appear to have a verb in the poll title: "should Jolla SDxC (exFAT) compatibility?" Should they add it, you mean? Or do you mean they should have "SDxC (exFAT) compatibility" over for a nice dinner for two?

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I want to cancel the whole tablet and release a jPll since a tablet without 3/4G cant be trusted 2015. But that option wasent available so I go with "yes, absolutely, I don't mind if they add it. Not at all"

However, I would be pist if they say said they are doing something at $xxxxx.xxxxx and they don't stand behind it when limit is reached...

Re: Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Yeah, the poll is non descriptive. For example I'm OK with Jolla providing exFAT compatibility as a paid package, not OK making it a crowdfunding stretch goal.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Which is not an option in the indiegogo campaign shmerl.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Poll editing is not possible.
Neither is my mother tongue EN but DE.
You are free to report and let it be changed by an moderator to your liking.

I am out ...

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I vote for (a) yes, they really need SDxC support but (b) it's really, really dumb to make it a stretch goal.

It just annoys the folks contributing to the effort, and there's really nothing "stretchy" about it: no exciting engineering work is required, you just pay for the license and you're done...

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

that's why it is a great first stretch goal, look at the second and imagine it done by May

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

In fairness, paying for a license like that is one of the clearest cases where the money has a specific and direct result, so one could argue (in fact, I guess I am arguing this) that that's a perfect example of a stretch goal. I do agree that it isn't exciting, and I am sad about that, but IMHO this is one of the more important additions they could make; having all the fancy cool features possible doesn't help much if many average users stumble and trip on pain points like the tablet failing to load their card they've been using.

We can always pester the sailors to add features like splitscreen later ;) but without a non-zero amount of cash they can't afford a license and that's hard to do post-launch, and in the meantime I'd suspect mainstream tech sites will make a bit deal about how it's so unpolished and use how their cards weren't supported as an example . . .

I'm very sympathetic to the point of view of giving Microsoft (and in general any patent fee enforcer) as little money as possible, but it's part of the damned SDXC standard in this case, so it seems like just too much of an uphill battle. Rather we bite our lips and soldier onwards, getting free and open source software in more folks' hands---and then in the future, if companies try and push some proprietary standard, maybe folks will object to that because it doesn't work with their great Jolla tablet!

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I had a very quick look (time limited), can't see any way to edit polls, even as a mod.
If one of the other mods knows how to, please do fix it...

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

with regards to sdxc, can we not just install fuse-exfat or build kernel module to use exfat sdxc card or just format differently like we do on n900?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Of course. Or you can build it as a kernel module.

However, this is not about the existance or use of exFAT, this is a more philosophical question on whether it is a good to use this as a perk.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Have you noticed one thing, guys? After they announced this stupid goal the contributions pace reduced DRASTICALLY. My evil side wishes they never reach that amount in order not to loose some buck to a patent troll.
Why won't they pick up THE most demanded feature out there as a stretch goal: BIGGER battery?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Maybe because they are committed to the current hardware and form factor. Increasing the size of the battery would require major rework on hardware. Simply put: In the given time frame, it just isn't possible

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Well as I said earlier in the other infamous thread, I'd like to see HW perks, not SW perks; Reason being that SW can always be updated later but HW is kind of stable in a tablet after it rolls off the conveyor belt in da factory. :)

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

"I do not mind them to add it"

Stupid debate.

Jolla: just concentrate on making an awesome tablet.

Thanks

JBT

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Not really, it lost alot of traction already a few days before that. Thats why they added the stretch goals.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

How can you know the SDCard reader is SW only?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

What does SDCard reader have to with this when this topic and poll is about fileformat support? (micro)SDcard reader was already there before the stretch-goal was announced.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Erm, because maybe they could have to exchange the whole reader?
We assume it's just software, bu we don't know it for sure, do we?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

That would be very very weird - the reader just provides an electrical interface that makes the data blocks on the card accessible to the OS. I don't see any reason why it would need to care about what lives on top of those blocks. Basically all storage works like this.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Not at all - after adding the stretch goals, for a few days the pace had increased (quite a lot, actually, to 30-40k per day, while it was around 15-20k per day the days before). But the problem is, the perks were added too late. If they added them the second or third day when the media hype was still on, they would have gained interest of many random visitors.

Whoever checks the page in the middle of the campaign has either already bought it, or had some interest from the beginning, so even if the stretch goal was "an awesome chocolate fountain", it wouldn't have gained more traction than this one.

People are forgetting one thing - the main stretch goal is 2,500k, but you need some middle ground, so people can get excited by reaching smaller checkpoints. I think that the stretch goals are really good, just added few days late.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I don't know how to vote.
I do not mind them licensing exFat or not, that is their business decision to make. I will not use the option, because it makes sharing the card on my gadgets/computers harder, but I understand it has some appeal to the general public.

I *do* mind that they try to paint it as a concession to the community requests, since they paint the campaing as "the first crowdsourced tablet", they should use together.jolla.com suggestions as a line guide. And the requests for >32Gb sd cards simply was not there: the specific question has like 11 votes, while there are at least two pages of "jolla-tablet" tagged questions that have more votes.

Also, it would be nice to have answers on the idea from Jolla managers or technicians, at least for the top requests.

For example, the number one question is for a bigger battery. I can understand that is out of the question for this hardware iteration. The good price of the tablet is probably due also to some compromise on the components. But it would be refreshing to get a clear answer about it. "We had a very good deal on those battery, and according to our tests, the tablet will stay usable for a reasonably long time" would do.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Sorry, it does not work that way :)

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Yes, I'd like that too! Perks for 15mm thick accessories like bat + kickstand combo are more than welcome!

I am afraid what we see reflected in two out of three of those amazing stretch goals is nothing more than the few options left on the OEM tablet shopping config list from the Taiwanese or Chinese manufacturer involved in this project.

Screen Size

[x] 7 inch
[ ] 10 inch
[ ] 12 inch

Wireless network:

[ ] 3.5G modem
[x] Wifi

External storage

[x] SD (SDXC "ready")
[ ] enable SDXC + eXfat

Sound
[x] Mono
[ ] Stereo (from 10 inch onward)
...

I could be wrong but I don't think Jolla has much designing to do except choosing color, front glass and corners of the package.
Not at that price point.

Jolla likes to compare specs vs Apple and Nexus vs Nokia but refrains from giving indications about the loudspeaker setup in the Jolla tablet.

Sound is an area where a lot under the hood design can improve the experience a lot but if you just let an OEM supplier handle the job you will end up with something like.. the Jolla phone: mono, sharp deformed noise loud enough to irritate the hell out of you but too silent to be heard when you need to catch that phone call.

"Nokia" N1 http://www.geekypinas.com/2014/11/ho...s-wolfson.html

Nexus 9 http://www.gottabemobile.com/2014/11...ideo-playback/

iPad Mini 3 https://www.apple.com/ipad-mini-3/specs/ At least they mention 2 speakers on the schematic.

Forget about IR, RadioTX, NFC touch to connect peripherals because the OEM manfucaturer will say those are not commonly requested, harder to setup and integrate and there for costlier.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I hope this poll will help end the bickering in slush 2014-thread. It used to be good reading.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

https://together.jolla.com/question/...put-is-needed/

^^ see

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

$1,476,372USD and 6 days more -> why do I not feel happy to see this reach 1,5 million?

From the somewhat shady explanations about SD -> SDHC -> SDXC we can deduct that once your reader supports SDHC it will be fine with SDXC cards.

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/de...-compatibility

About the max speed achievable , there is UHS talk and it is not clear which readers will give best performance.

Jolla is kind enough NOT to limit the internal memory by only offering 16GB - 32 GB - 64GB options wich cannot be expanded when need arrises afterwards. Jolla is not forcing the users straight into some cloud storage or to think very hard about the life cycle / memory requirements of their purchase.

The user should understand that having to reformat their new ex-Fat pre-formatted SD card formaking it Sailfish ready is a very small price to pay compared a plausible scenario of running out of fixed memory and having to sell and re-purchase the same but next higher internal memory version or use cloud storage. Even if they have to ask assistance for this.

At the current price of Micro SDXC 64GB cards I don't see users swap them all the time from computer to camera to tablet. Those cards get put and forgotten by common users , just like the HD in their laptop.
Besides, the best form factor for regular swapping is normal SD not Micro SD. (Micro getting lost blown in the wind or swallowed by pet, need for unreliable adapter card, wear on more fragile contacts etc..)

The question is:

Will Jolla integrate instead of paying exFat license integrate a nice GUI formatting SD formatting tool
and last but not least, will the SDXC media itself wear quicker if not using the exFat file system?

For those with warranty concerns:

I recently got RMA exchanged a 10yr waranty 64GB ultra Sandisk that had been behaving bad from the start after I have proven the write errors through some Windows tool that will write chunks of 1GB on the card and verify.

Yes they ask what you did / tried with the card and I told them I tried all different kinds of file systems (ext 4, ext 3, btrfs, NTFS etc) in Nokia N900 and PV808 (devices to "only support" less than 64GB capacity)

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

There's no easy answer to this. A while ago I did some research because I really wanted to do The Right Thing™ when formatting an SDXC for the Jolla phone.

From what I understood then (and what I still remember), it's pretty easy to make mistakes without ever noticing (except that the card will be slower and wear out sooner, which you will not know because you didn't test before/after.) One aspect is that file systems in general should keep write operations to a minimum. Journalling file systems have an overhead in this regard, so they might not be the ideal choice. The nice thing about FAT and its children is that they are so unsophisticated, making them a good choice. This is a general (and probably: too) general answer, though. You'd need to compare pros and cons of each file system on flash memory to get a valid answer. (And I, of course, only compared the choices natively available in the Jolla phone's kernel. In this comparison, FAT32 seemed to be the only reasonable choice.)

The other aspect is that when you found a file system that you think is good enough, you'll need some information about the hardware of the SDXC card to keep the logical blocks of the file system and the physical entities of the card in alignment. Otherwise, you'll end up re-writing two 8GB (or larger) blocks when you'd only need to change a few kB that are the file systems smallest unit. Obtaining this information about the hardware is tricky. In theory, you should be able to read it from /sys/block/<devicename>/device/preferred_erase_size and fromcurrently set exFAT parameters. In practice, the value in /sys is often either missing or incorrectly set to 4GB. There are tools that help you detect the right values, but they need human expertise to interpret their output.

So the bottom line is:
When you re-format your card, even to exFAT, chances are very, very high that it doesn't work as well afterwards as it did with the pre-formatted file system. What's worse is that there's no tool that will tell you: "Ooops, something went wrong, block alignment isn't perfect on this card." You'll just keep using a card that is slower than what you paid for and will wear out sooner. So I'd prefer not having to do all this again.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

What immediately springs to mind is, if it is possible to fish out the correct parameters from a preformatted SD card before removing the existing exFAT formatting?
Then it would be easy to use the correct parameters to format it to a sensible filesystem?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Purely speculation on my part - perhaps someone from Jolla can step in.

There are hardware or maybe even just firmware issues that may be in play. The physical card reader is obviously no different between SD and SDxc but it has been known that some host controllers do not support SDxc.

I would think it unlikely that Jolla would pick a host controller in the first place that didn't allow access to SDxc cards, even without exFAT support, unless there's something about the Intel tablet hardware they're using that doesn't support SDxc unless it's specified as part of the build and switched on in firmware after licencing from SDA.

The other thing I guess is that people* might want to read the SDxc specification and what it says about filesystems and FAT type systems in particular as well as the expectations that are placed on the OS and the host controller that relate directly to the structure of the filesystem and card with respect to timings and placement of things like allocation tables in particular locations. It's quite a complex document but 'FAT' appears all over the place in it, almost like the designed it with that in mind.

If you had the luxury to build a card, controller, specify the filesystem and the OS interaction with it then this debate might make sense. Presumably that's what Samsung are trying to do with f2fs. But until that is ubiquitous we still have the legacy of the SDxc standard and devices that use it.



* I'm sure somebody reads standards documents.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Presumably that is what this does...

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Is there any downside in using file system UDF on a microsd card bigger than 32 GB?
I don't have one unfortunately, so cannot test it on the different operating systems; does for example windows ask to format it to exfat anyway? Does it work on linux?

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Yes. See the discussion which relates to USB keys but most of the same issues will follow for SD...

http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf

It's unlikely UDF works on consumer devices such as cameras.

Alternative filesystem support is a sideshow though. The issue is "Do you want to support standards that rely on patents or closed licences?" and that issue has already left the building as Jolla ships with many of those already - Exchange, GSM, MP3, H.264, HERE Maps.... and people have signed up for 128GB SDHC (sic) support expecting it making the 'controversy' over exFAT all the more stupid.

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Now if that only was available for the OS of my preference :D

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

I saw the page you link to, and I cannot read about a problem with a 128 GB microsd (or usb stick), as long as it's formatted in the proper way?

Any filesystem different from fat32 or exfat doesn't work on cameras anyway (I think), so I don't expect to use that 128 GB microsd on my camera; for that I'll use a fat32 32 GB one.

Also, on a personal note regarding the whole sdxc issue, for me Jolla is free to do whatever they think is better for them, as long as I will be able to use a 128 GB microsd with any filesystem. Actually I also expect to be able to access the data on that microsd on my windows PC without having to format it (I'm ok with installing a driver or so).
Not so keen on paying extra (exfat in jolla store) for being able to do that though, depending on how much that would be; so the only way I see so far to do that is to use UDF as file system. And that's why I'm looking for any downsides.

Why I wouldn't like to have to pay for it: if Jolla ends up selling exfat through the Jolla store with that as only solution to access the card on Windows, for like 90%+ of consumers (likely Windows users) it will be like if the first perk of their indiegogo campaign is about being able to pay extra for a feature. Which is not mentioned in the first perk. For the 3G/4G perk it's clearly mentioned that there would be an additional cost for the feature instead.
I understand that Jolla devices are popular between Linux users, but to ignore proper support for Windows consumers or telling them to pay extra is being "unfriendly" to the biggest part of the consumer base?

Btw, I'm all but a Microsoft or Windows supporter, it just happens that I use Windows at the moment. Also, I find the exfat <-> SD consortium agreement an absolute wrong thing, which should be sanctioned/cancelled by those useless antitrust bodies.

damn, this got longer than I wanted

Re: [POLL] Jolla tablet and SDxC (exFAT) stretch goal
 

Many of them, yes. Some is still guesswork. And of course you can only do this if your computer/phone/tablet can read exFAT in the first place. So if you want a solution that works, say, on the current Jolla phone as a self-contained "reformat this card" script, you cant read and use those parameters.

But it's what I did, of course: I installed exFAT support on a desktop PC and tried to read whatever was visible about the layout of the file system.