Sunday 30th July 2006

Card Reader 1.0.3 Review

It is something of a mystery why Palm do not implement the USB Mass Storage device class (umass) in all their USB connected handhelds fitted with cards slots. Allowing the handheld to act as a USB Flash drive is such an obvious and useful feature that its absence from many Palm handhelds is most peculiar.

There have been numerous occasions when I've needed to take home files from a customer's PC and have had to dump them onto a USB drive, when if they had been on the Palm I could have reviewed them on the way home. There have been times too when I've needed to install utilities on the Tungsten when far from home. Clients are rightly dubious of installing Palm's Desktop on their machines just to transfer a few files - at one client's it would be a sacking offence.

However there are a number of inexpensive third party utilities that fix the Palm's inadequacy and allow it to masquerade as a USB drive. These allow files and new applications to be easily transferred to the Palm in the field. Card Reader 1.0.3 by Mobile Stream, is an excellent example of the class.

Installation of the demo is straight forward and the utility is activated just like a normal application. In the 14-day demo version the [Connect] button has a ten-second delay and the power-saving features are disabled, but otherwise it works the same as the unlocked version.

With the Palm plugged into one of the PC's USB ports the Palm appears in "My Computer" in under 3 seconds after hitting Card Reader's [Connect] button. From the PC point of view the Palm's SD card looks like any other USB Mass Storage device. It's then possible to use Windows to transfer data and Palm applications to and from the card. A .prc can be installed by loading it to the SD card using Card Reader and then copying it from SD card to RAM using any suitable Palm utility or launcher. ZLauncher makes it particularly easy.

Performance tests show that Card Reader could write to a Tungsten E's SD slot at a sustained rate of 525 Kbytes/second. This means that in practice 496 Mbytes made up of 579 photos and video files took sixteen and a half minutes to transfer to the card.

Reading was about twice as fast, at a sustained 1075 KBytes/second. This means that reading the 496 Mbytes back from the card took a fraction over eight minutes. All timings were taken with a 1 Gbyte Viking Interworks SD card that initially had only a couple of hundred Mbytes of data on it and little fragmentation. The Viking Interworks SD cards are by no means the fastest SD cards on the market, but are very cheaply available from Amazon and the three I use have proven to be reliable. Incidentally peeling off the Viking labels reveals that the cards are actually made by Toshiba.

What really impressed was Card Reader's ability to continue transferring in the background. Attempting to switch away to the launcher or another application whilst Card Reader is connected pops up a dialogue allowing you to disconnect or continue Card Reader operations in the background. I repeated the reading of 496 Mbytes back from the card but this time in the background whilst editing in pedit and DayNotez using MessagEaseKB. The transfer took just over five minutes longer in the background, with no noticeable degredation in foreground operations - though none of the foreground applications used were particularly CPU intensive. Running games in the foreground might make any loss in performance more noticable.

Mode	Transfer	Minutes	Transfer Rate
Foreground	PC to Palm	16:30	525 Kbytes/sec
Foreground	Palm to PC	8:04	1075 Kbytes/sec
Background	Palm to PC	13:20	650 Kbytes/sec
All figures are for transferring 496 Mbytes of mixed media in 579 files between Windows XP and a Tungsten E with a Viking 1 Gbyte SD card.

Incidentally reading the same 496 Mbytes of data from the card using a no-name card reader that cost very slightly more than the Card Reader software took exactly 11 minutes, considerably slower than Card Reader running in the foreground.

Finally I copied the executables of EditPad Lite to the SD card in the Tungsten and tried to execute the Windows text editor from the card. It loaded and ran in under two seconds with no problems at all.

Mobile-Stream say that Card Reader can handle multiple card slots simultaneously. Unfortunately I did not have the hardware available to test that functionality.

Once registered, Card Reader has three additional options:

Try to connect on launching
Enable power off if no I/O activity
Permit backlight disabling

'Try to connect on launching' is worth keeping on as default. It saves hitting the [Connect] button, which is rather redundant, since there is no other reason you would normally be starting the application. Attempting to connect when the Palm is not plugged into anything does not cause any hangs or timeouts.

'Enable power off if no I/O activity' prevents the Palm being kept powered on by the connection if left plugged into the PC and forgotten about. This is especially easy to do if the next option is used.

'Permit backlight disabling' switches off the backlighting after ten seconds of user inactivity - if the Palm is connected as a USB drive. If the Palm fails to connect or detects pen inputs then the backlight stays on.

In summary Card Reader 1.0.3 is an excellent implementation of the USB Mass Storage device class for the Palm platform. It worked perfectly throughout the review period and, despite my best efforts, not a single byte was lost during the transfer of many Gbytes of data.

The ability to continue transfers in the background is excellent and is ideal for loading up with MP3s or other multimedia whilst carrying on working in the foreground. Registration through clickapps.com was quick and easy.

Card Reader 1.0.3 is shareware and costs $11.95.

Reviewed by Jonathan Littlewood, 30-Jul-2006

Pros:

Great implementation of the USB Mass Storage device class
Palm card looks like USB Flash drive to PC
Transfers can continue in the background

Cons:

Nothing

Other sites:

Mobile Stream

Posted by frogplate.

Tags: palmOS