4 GB SDHC Card

When I got my Palm TX last year, one of the features I liked was that it would hold up to a 4 gigabyte (GB) SD card. At the time SD cards of that size were about $60 and Fry’s had 2 GB cards for $12. So I wound up buying three 2 GB cards. I put TV shows on one and music on another and would alternate them, listening to music on the way to work while reading the paper and watching TV shows on the way home. I can put 8 30-minute shows on one card and 430 songs on the other (which takes me a couple of months to go through). But if I had one big card I wouldn’t have to swap them out. I never really had much use for the third card. My idea was to put a long playlist on one card and a collection of CD’s on the other card. But since I listen to CD’s in the car, I just listen to the playlist on the Palm. I could put all of this on the nano, I guess, which has 8 GB, but the screen on the nano is much smaller and I would have to change the format of the video files from .avi to .mp4.


This year Fry’s had 4 GB SD cards on sale and they wound up being $5 after a $25 mail-in rebate. I went up there Black Friday afternoon and nearly bought it, but the check-out line was too long (300 people at least) and I left. I returned that night and got the card along with a 3-license version of Kaspersky Internet Security that would be free after $60 in mail-in rebates.

When I got home I cut open the hermetically sealed packaging and stuck the 4 GB card in my Palm. Nothing. I tried looking at the card properties app on the Palm and it said no card had been inserted. Maybe it needed to be formatted first. I stuck the card in my card reader. This time it froze Windows Explorer up until I took it out of the reader. I noticed that the card said it was a SDHC card. It also said it was “turbo” and I thought that was as meaningless as the HC (for “High Capacity”). But SDHC is a different type of hardware and it turns out the Palm TX (and two different card readers) can’t read it. There is no software fix for the Palm. Looking at Amazon, almost all 4 GB and greater cards are SDHC.

So now I’m stuck with a 4 GB SDHC card. I have a few options:

1. It can probably be used in Mom’s new camera

2. I’m sure if I got a newer card reader it that it could be read and I could use for backing up big files like my 2 GB e-mail archive at work.

3. I could return it to Fry’s and try to get my money back.

4. I could turn in the rebate and then sell the card on E-Bay, albeit in opened packaging and with no idea of whether it really works.

Suggestions?

Follow up: I wound up selling it on eBay.

2 thoughts on “4 GB SDHC Card”

  1. Well you had me convinced on what a great deal this was going to be compared to getting a nano. Then I remembered you had a nano. eBay is the way to go because you can mail it with a first class stamp. Just include a link to this blog entry in the ebay posting so they can see what a GREAT AND HONEST GUY TED IS!!!

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