News

SD WiFi card debuts from Sandisk - slow, say reviewers

It has taken a long time since Sandisk first announced it was going to do a Secure Digital wireless LAN card (back in January) to the point that it is shipping, and first reports suggest that the wait wasn't altogether worth while.

The original "Connect" range announcement, back at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, promised four devices that would plug into the postage-stamp sized sockets in some smartphones and pocket computers, giving them WiFi capability and memory.

At the January launch, the company said: "The Connect product line includes four products - dual-function 128 megabyte (MB) CompactFlash(CF) and 256MB SD cards that combine WiFi and flash memory as well as single-function CF and SD cards with WiFi connectivity."

According to one reviewer, the first of these products has now shipped, at $139 - a plain WiFi card, without memory.

It runs slower than any other network card, says Gerry Blackwell of WiFi Planet.

Try to find out why this should be the case, and you're in for a flaming. A quick read of the SD specification might suggest that it runs at 10 megabytes per second. A more careful read shows that this is probably the data transfer rate on the chip in the card, to its interface. As to how fast the interface itself talks to the backplane, is even harder to guess - there are several variants on the spec, but most SD cards in the field probably struggle to reach 10 megabits (not bytes) per second.

It gets more complex, because quite a few run on backplanes which don't attempt to reach the maximum speed, and are throttled back to two megabits per second.

Blackwell wasn't running anywhere near the maximum speed. By his own admission, his tests were pretty "unscientific" because he was accessing the Internet - so his speeds will never have been able to go faster than the Internet connection. That was a cable-modem service from Rogers Communications Inc., a Canadian cable TV company, with top speeds of 1.5Mbps (megabits!) download.

To compare, Blackwell used four devices: an iPaq with the Sandisk card; a desktop PC (Dell Dimension 4300) on a wired Ethernet link to the router; a Toshiba laptop with a two-year-old Actiontec 802.11b card; and a 600MHz HP desktop PC located one floor away and connected via an ActionTec WiFi PCI card.

For reasons that he describes as unclear, the Sandisk WiFi SD card was slow. "In each case, I tested the iPaq with the Sandisk card at the same time as the other devices and at the same distance from the router. It always scored significantly lower than the other WiFi devices -- from about 170Kbps in the downstairs location to a high of 240Kbps upstairs.

The price is also disappointing. In January, Sandisk predicted "street" prices for the Connect range: "The WiFi (802.11b) CF and SD Connect cards have a suggested retail price of $99.95." That's noticeably below the $130 announced for the current WiFi card without memory.

It also said that the dual-function CompactFlash WiFi cards with 128MB of capacity would be priced at $129.95, while the dual-function 256MB SD cards would be priced at $149.95.

There has also been unexplained delay. The CF WiFi card was available at launch in January. The schedule for delivery was specific: "The CF dual-function card and the SD WiFi card will be available in March and the SD dual-function card is expected to ship at mid-year." Then there were "plans to add 256MB cards to the CF Connect product line by the middle of 2003." That won't ship till the end of the year, on current forecasts.

One guess for the poor performance worth considering would be antenna design. The antenna simply can't be optimal size, and there's no space

Blackwell has other reservations about the antenna: "The Sandisk card ... sticks up above the top of the iPaq unit by almost an inch. The light plastic casing is not a problem with SD flash memory cards that insert all the way into the slot, but with this extension for the antenna, I would be concerned about damage even in normal-use environments," he reports.

Best guess for the reason for the delay will have to wait until Sandisk responds to questions ... but it could have to do with discussions with other manufacturers. At launch, observers predicted that the new SDIO Now! standard would be influential.

"Sandisk's introduction of a dual-function SDIO card combining Wi-Fi with flash memory opens new expansion options for customers using SDIO Now! enabled devices," said Kent Hellebust, senior vice president, marketing and product management, Bsquare, at the CES launch. "With Microsoft and leading OEM companies adopting SDIO Now! as the industry standard for PocketPC-based IO expansion, Sandisk's SDIO cards are a welcome addition to the growing peripheral expansion market," he said.

Sandisk's SD Wi-Fi cards also will support devices with Palm's OS 4x and higher operating systems.