Comment by Jarred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jarred | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid I agree with this post. I bought a Samsung Focus on Black Friday with AT&T's Buy One Get One Free deal. What I like about it is the nice looking user interface and the web browser. (As a phone itself Samsung Focus is awesome). The actual Windows Phone 7 OS is awful. I put in a 16gb memory card a few months ago and it's incredibly slow. Everything takes a long time to load. By "long time to load" I mean 5+ minutes to open an app. All of the apps are tremendously slower after installing that memory card. That's most likely due to the memory card itself, but it's practically unheard of for phones to have dramatic performance reductions after installing a memory card. That makes me believe it's the software.

I really bought it because A) I like to try new things and B) I like developing with .NET/Silverlight because of the awesome development tools.

I had a G1 before and although not as slow as that was (I updated it to 2.2 at the time), this OS isn't a good buy.

The phone itself though is really nice, it has a high resolution screen (480x800) with a 5 mega-pixel camera and it's really light.

The slowness is the memory card. I have a Focus with a high end memory card and it's great.

WP7 software RAIDs (kinda) the SD card with the internal flash and treats it all the same. One nice thing about it is that unlike my Nexus One, all storage is first class storage. Apps, music, photos, video - All of it can go anywhere, with no special casing. The bad thing is that if your SD card is slow, everything is slow.

That said, Microsoft should have known OEMs would expose the card slot, and that users would put in slow cards. They should have gracefully handled it, or had the OS ignore/reject crappy cards, like they did with ReadyBoost on Windows.

It definitely is the memory card- WP7 isn't designed to have removable memory, and Samsung apparently didn't get that memo: http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/17/windows-phone-7s-microsd-...

Here's a thread on xda-developer forum of working MicroSD cards list

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=834144

Confirmed Working(Data remains after soft reset):

Centon 8GB Class 6

Kingston 4GB Class 4

Kingston 16GB Class 4

Microcenter 16GB Class 2

Patriot 16GB Class 2

PNY 8GB Class 4

PNY 16GB Class 2

SanDisk 8GB Class 2

SanDisk 16GB Class 4

Currently Unstable/Unsure:

Kingston 8GB Class 4

Kingston 32GB Class 4

SanDisk 16GB Class 2

SanDisk 32GB Class 2

Confirmed Not Working(Data gone after soft reset):

A-Data

A-Data 4GB Class 6

A-Data 8GB Class 6

A-Data 16GB Class 6

Lexar 16GB Class 6

Transcend 8GB Class 6

Transcend 16GB Class 6

Also, just found Patriot 16GB Class 4 on Amazon, it now claims it works on Samsung Focus

http://www.amazon.com/MicroSD-Memory-Samsung-Mobile-MicroSDH...

Thanks for the list.

When I bought a memory card from Fry's I just picked a cheap 16GB one

Which happens to be that Patriot 16GB Class 4.

I did perform the reset and all of the setting up upon initially putting it in

I do also have a lot of music, my phone has around gigabyte or two of leftover space on it but it should never be this slow.

As others have said, you're not supposed to replace the memory card for WP7 mobiles. I have a LG Optimus and I've never had any slowness issues.

I was concerned about the lack of upgradable memory before the purchase but it's nice to not have to worry about switching in and out cards and worrying about exactly where anything is saved. I did make sure I purchased a 16MB model though, being stuck with 8MB would suck.

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