Why the hell are they so insistent on fucking up the storage situation on Android phones?
The N1 has just 512mb flash built in, and while it has a Micro SD slot for your media, Android will only use the system flash for storing the OS, apps, and app data. They screwed up earlier with the G1 which only had 256mb, not enough to install any official OS updates, and instead of learning their lesson they just bumped it up one notch.
While users may plead loudly about how they want expandable storage, they fucking hate it when you make them manage what's stored where, and this is not a UI area you're going to be able to polish. 4gb of flash is the bare minimum you can get away with, and premium SKUs with 32gb+ are a given -- this is your chance to pile on markup without anyone complaining.
Apple's abhorrence towards removable storage isn't just because Jobs is a dick, or the form factor compromises, but simply because it's a usability nightmare.
It really is. Fortunately with modded firmwares you can use the SD card for more than it was originally intended, like partitioning it for storing your applications and even a linux swap. Still, it's a mega usability nightmare. Because the card also stores all your photos and music, when you want to connect it to your computer it has to unmount on the device, and there goes all your apps with it. Which causes things to hang and die.
Considering the cost of physical memory these days.. it doesn't make sense not to include a larger bit of internal storage. Heck they can even keep the SD slot on there for extra storage for those who desire it.
Depends on how you expose the SD card to the computer. If you let it touch the filesystem directly, then yeah, the device can't use the card at the same time. But if you make the phone act like a USB network card, and then run Samba on that network interface, both devices can modify the data at the same time. (My Archos/Android mp3 player does this.)
There is also some media sync protocol that Microsoft invented that avoids this problem.
Since applications store most of their resources on the SD card the ROM size isn't a huge deal for potential application room. The binaries themselves are fairly small. But yeah, at least ship a 16GB card in the thing. It just looks bad to say 4GB on a spec sheet for a SmartPhone these days.
The kind of person that picks up an Android phone is tech-savvy enough to handle manual file storage. I like it, actually, because it lets me use my phone as a flash drive.
Regarding app data, from the Gizmodo liveblog:
They store apps in the internal ROM and not on the SD card now, for piracy reasons, but they will offer an upgrade soon for installing apps on the SD card.
That's why they're still a niche player- it's far too much about techies and open source fans right now, and that will poison the App Store selection moving forward for the mainstream.
The N1 has just 512mb flash built in, and while it has a Micro SD slot for your media, Android will only use the system flash for storing the OS, apps, and app data. They screwed up earlier with the G1 which only had 256mb, not enough to install any official OS updates, and instead of learning their lesson they just bumped it up one notch.
While users may plead loudly about how they want expandable storage, they fucking hate it when you make them manage what's stored where, and this is not a UI area you're going to be able to polish. 4gb of flash is the bare minimum you can get away with, and premium SKUs with 32gb+ are a given -- this is your chance to pile on markup without anyone complaining.
Apple's abhorrence towards removable storage isn't just because Jobs is a dick, or the form factor compromises, but simply because it's a usability nightmare.