In last month's issue, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz discussed some of the amazing advantages inherent in SD cards, highly secure stamp-sized flash memory cards that can expand the functionality of all the most recent Palm handheld releases. You can find the article, "Big solutions from tiny SD cards," at http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200201/peeditorial0102001.html. Apparently, many of you agreed. In this edition of Letters to the Editor, we share two readers' thoughts on how expansion technology is improving the way they work.

Ten textbooks, one tiny card
I couldn't help but agree so much with your article on the SD card!

I'm a neurologist with a Palm m505 and a 64MB SD card, and I'm heavily reliant on my SD card. I've got 10 reference textbooks, a radiology atlas with text and scans (yes, real CT and MRI scans) of 100 different diseases, an IMDB (Internet Movie Database) movie list (I'm a movie freak) of all movies from 1960 (21,000 movie listings), a Webster's dictionary, two drug pharmacopoeias listing thousands of drugs, a 5MB movie clip of my daughter, and I still have 20MB left! For people like me, the SD card is a fantastic way to carry huge amounts of information around easily. One of my colleagues has in fact termed it a "spare brain," since there are just so many occasions that I need to refer to a textbook!

And if I ever run of of space, thanks for the tip on the 128MB SD card!

Nigel Tan

Additional memory a big win
Good article. You point out one of the exciting uses of additional memory. I have a Handspring Visor Prism. There are adapters for it that allow you to use CF (Compact Flash) as well as Smart Media. I've had a 128MB CF card for my Prism for almost a year now. They have gotten cheaper, but I bought my CF module from eBay for about $80, if I remember correctly. I think I paid $35 for the adapter, but there are better ones available today, including one called MemPlug from Portable Innovation Technology Ltd (at http://www.memplug.com). I just noticed they also have an adapter for the Memory Stick.

I have four different translations of the entire Bible from Olive Tree Bible Software (at http://www.olivetree.com). It allows you to read the Bible directly from the CF module. There are several Doc readers that also allow you to read from the expanded memory. I have several PDF files with Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Palm OS.

I also back up my Visor to the CF memory. There are utilities to run programs from the expanded memory. They actually copy the application to the Visor's 8MB and move it back out when you terminate/leave the application. Basically I have applications and data many times the 8MB capacity available on my Visor, and it has greatly enhanced its usefulness.

I don't know if there is already a company producing an adapter for the SD format, but I'm sure if it can be done, someone will do it.

Thanks,
Robert Garcia