December 21, 2007, Newsletter Issue #87: Sony's Memory Stick

Tip of the Week

Memory Stick is Sony's proprietary flash memory card. The company has been requiring the use of the Memory Stick since 1999 in all Cyber-shot digital still cameras and most Handycam video recorders, as well as its PDAs and some computers and portable music products.
The original Memory Stick comes in limited sizes -- only up to 128 MB -- and is very slow, compared to today's high-speed SD and CF cards. In 2003, Sony came out with the Memory Stick Pro, which has capacity of up to 2GB and transfer speeds comparable to other high-speed cards. However, you cannot use Memory Stick Pro cards with all pre-2003 Sony digital cams.
If you're a Sony user, the Memory Stick lets you use cards to transfer images and data between your camera, laptop, PDA, etc. But if you're not ready to go all Sony, these proprietary Memory Stick and Memory Stick pro cards are virtually useless. Sony has a challenge by almost always limiting users to its proprietary technology, when open source seems to be the popular trend.



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