Memories are made of this

With the imminent arrival of my new phone (finally), I needed to get a new microSD card for it.

These things still amaze me. 32GB of data on something half the size of my fingertip.

microSD card

Cue the Hovis ad music[1]

Now, when I were a lad, my first computer was a ZX Spectrum, with a quite frankly astonishing 48Kb of memory. This was some time ago, admittedly, and was a HUGE step up from the mighty ZX81, with a whole kilobyte of RAM.

My first PC, some ten years later[2], came with a whopping 4Mb of RAM, and an astonishing 100Mb hard drive. What could you possibly put in that amount of space? Ridiculous.

And now, we’re talking gigabytes on your fingertip. The MicroSD card format is so tiny it’s absurd. I’m not sure you could go any smaller and still have it be actually usable.

I wonder where we’ll be in another ten years. Past the days of physical memory, no doubt. Everything will be online, all the time.

Which will bring the added advantage of not having to try and open those cursed plastic blister packs…

[1] which probably ages me pretty well.
[2] and, depressingly, twenty years ago…

Phones

Seen on the news this morning: Nokia’s £13 phone with a battery that lasts a month

Finnish smartphone maker Nokia has launched a budget mobile that costs less than a cheap rubber smartphone case – and has a battery that lasts one month per charge.

An interesting idea from our Finnish friends. The trend has been for bigger and bigger smartphones that do any and everything, but here’s the Nokia 105, a phone that’s dirt cheap and with a battery life that actually makes sense.

My current phone is a two year old HTC Desire S, and the battery lasts maybe a couple of days if I’m *really* careful and switch off 3G, turn the screen brightness down and only use it occasionally. In regular daily use the battery is down to 10% by bedtime, and it lives on my desk plugged into a USB lead to make it through the day. I’m a fairly heavy user of it though, checking Twitter and emails regularly (yes, and Facebook from time to time). I also watch video on my phone on my commute, read books on the kindle app, check train times etc.

I’m due an upgrade on my current contract in July, and have spent some time looking at the latest & greatest smartphones. I quite like the look of the HTC One X and the Nexus 4, but both are *massive* phones, verging on the mini-tablet. I’m not sure my pockets could cope! And I bet battery life hasn’t improved – bigger screen + faster processor…

So, would I swap out my beloved always-connected HTC for a Nokia candybar phone?

I have to say that I’m tempted. Simplicity of use + a long long battery life sound very appealing…

%d bloggers like this: