Saturday, August 9, 2008

How to add 8GB of memory to Sony Ericsson K750i

My previous memory stick in my mobile phone was a 4GB MS Pro Duo card. This is the maximum the phone is supposed to be able to cope with. I took a slight risk and paid £23 for an 8GB MS2 card (with Pro Duo adapter) with the intent of extending my mobile's life as a thrifty guy's iPod.

Initially there seemed to be a problem reliably writing files but after re-formatting and using a card reader (rather than the phone cable) to update files, it seems to do the job. I formatted using DOS with the command FORMAT E: /FS:FAT32 /A:4096, check this discussion as to why I chose these options. The phone status only reports a 4GB card but it actually does cope with 8GB.

I'm amazed to fit such a large card on a three year old mobile phone. This is enough space to take a large MP3 music collection (about 50 CD's worth of music, including 15 hours of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung), 40 podcast subscriptions, a couple of free audio books, various maps supporting my GPS bluetooth gadget, document backups and 2.5GB spare for future growth.

For document backups I use TrueCrypt to keep an encrypted 400MB disk image which can be mounted on my Mac or a PC that includes all my scanned documents over the last two years (I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to keep PDF versions of bank statements, tax bills etc.) as well as other key reference documents. This may seem an odd thing to keep on the phone but if I was on holiday and my laptop got stolen I could still print out identity documents if someone lent me a PC. By using encryption if the phone was stolen at least I wouldn't worry about my ID being compromised.

My old 4GB memory card? This is now in my pocket camera (Sony T100) giving enough space for 3 hours of 640x480 video or 1,600 photos at 2592x1944 (5MB) resolution.

2 comments:

tiger74 said...

Good info. Just curious, is there any difference between the 8GB M2 and the 8GB Duo, apart from the size? I am also trying to squeeze a little more useful life out of my k750i with a 4GB Duo.

I have just tried a 16GB Duo and while I can copy the files from my computer to the card, after it is inserted into the phone, files are deleted from the card if the total files in the phone created folders exceed 4GB. I was a little surprised since the card is FAT32 format which should support 32GB.

Ashley said...

There are differences between the M2 standard and the old Duo. The M2 is compatible with the different voltages of the new mobile phones. There's some useful information on Wikipedia.

You'll note that I put files on the 8GB card using a card reader rather than the Sony phone cable as this does seem to screw up the files (probably as it is treating the card as 4GB). I can read all the 8GB of files on the mobile phone but I avoid editing/deleting these files from the mobile applications.