Why? Or at least, why should the N900 do that? It's not like it's always spending time accessing the memory card (possibly unlike some old phones which actually uses the card as its main storage. And even then it would depend a lot on the card. Some of these high-capacity cards are _fast_.) There's really no more reason that the N900 should be slowed down by a card than your desktop computer should be slowed down by a card.

Yeah, I have kinda noticed that also. My first thought when I noticed it was that the phone is indexing the content. Which probably it was at first, but even after a few days it still was slowing down in use. I used my N79 for testing, and had the latest firmware on the device. Taking photos and recording video was my major test, also I had all my messaging on the memory cards - SMS and email, and contacts (800 or so).

I THINK that fragmentation and wear are the two major issues with transfer rates slowing down - but the phone seemed a little slower to use and that would have nothing to do with (constant) reading/writing of the card? Random seek times probably affect the writing times as well, and even my 8GB and 16GB cards were the same brand and speed class, I know that the writing speed isn't compared/spec'd with the class ranking. Also, wear leveling might be something that wasn't perfect with the N79?

Obviously I'm not well educated in (solid state) memory tech, but ultimately I just concluded that having more space slowed my N79 down and the reason remained unknown.

So... I'd really like to see some tests done with the N900 and different memory cards - at the moment I can't but I really need to do some tests myself too.

And the way the N900 uses memory is radically different than in the N79, in practical use N900 accesses the SD card much less as the internal memory is used for most of the before mentioned read/write tasks, camera is the only task accessing the external card so that fast access times probably don't matter with the N900 as much? I'll be taking a lot of video and I have the internal memory full of mp3's so a bigger-than-8GB card is on the shopping list.

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I personally never had any doubts that the N900 wouldn't support large MicroSDHC cards, It's not like it's debatable as the SDHC standard has that size specified.

Ok guys, heres my noob question.

The N900 is advertised as having expandable memory UP TO 16gb. Is that just a suggestion? Is there not any reason it can't handle 32gb? Did Nokia advertise 16gb as that was the largest memory available?

If 32GB microSD is SDHC and not SDXC, then N900 should support it just fine. Why wouldn't it?
MicroSD is also by default formatted as FAT32 mostly. That can handle 32GB just fine. (of course)

it could just be because a lot of the 16gb microsdhc out there is slow as hell, particularly the first to market

The N95 was advertised as supporting up to 2GB (they added SDHC support in a FW and said it supports up to 8GB), I bought my 16GB for it when I had it.

Cool thanks...

Dude, this post has humongous levels of awesomeness to it! This is great news! Thanks for the post!

Sandisk released their 32GB card today... $200 US though. That's kinda pricey considering their 16GB card can be found for $50 US.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/...anos/?news=123

Also, the 32GB sandisk is class 2