[jackbox]

Photos and/or a video would be greatly appreciated. I don't have mine in hand yet as I am in Thailand and fear breaking the device. I would like to see how it is done so I don't pry or twist something the wrong way and snap something. Thanks in advance.

 

[sharpfork2]

I'm spending my time on software at this point; but, opening up the back is easy so I took a few pics for you because I know how much it sucks to think about this thing with little info.

http://imgur.com/novel

The first pic is sliding the back open. There is some doubles sided tape holding the back on so the first time is a bit of a pain. The back is meant to be able to come off so its a million times easier than other things I've opened like an iphone or xbox. Once you get the back opened like the picture of the outside, you can slide the back down and it comes of easily.EDITEDOnce you get the back off, you can see the mico sd card (see pic). The metal part that locks it in has text on it to show witch way to slide the metal mechanism:LOCK<--OPEN-->pull the old one out, put the new one in.I'm not 100% sure about the right way to format it.

 

[rspray]

The sd card is held by a slide lock mechanism. No need for cutting. It soides up, then it will fall out.

 

[jackbox]

Thank you sharpfork2. I am on the fence about keeping it and having it shipped to Thailand or having my mother return it. Wonder what people think of the little guy. With its specs it can be awesome if the firmware is updated to 2.2 with Android Market or hackers get a better Android working using the existing kernel.

 

[jackbox]

My cell phone has the same SD card mechanism. They are quite easy to use and hold the card in securely. I am suprised they used a micro-sd card in an area they didn't intend to be user serviceable. I guess they wanted to be able to make models with memory using the same PCB builds.[quote name='rspray;15892]The sd card is held by a slide lock mechanism. No need for cutting. It soides up' date=' then it will fall out.[/QUOTE']

 

[sharpfork2]

Well that was easy

. I just swapped it our for a 2 gig card in like 30 seconds. That was easier than swapping it out in my droid aside form the fact that my droid's battery door pretty much falls off and the Novel takes a bit of work.

 

[rspray]

Im rockin 16gb internal now. Im glad, too, becase it doesnt look like the regular sd slot uis good for anythung but periodically importing things.

 

[lawman]

Nearly all micro SD slots are the same: slide forward (toward the top of the card or the curved part of the metal slider) to lock, slide back to open.

 

[lawman]

oh, and this:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...78&cm_re=micro_sd_card-_-20-211-378-_-Productat class 6 should make 16gb very nice internally...

 

[ofacto]

Since you can upgrade the internal micro-sd card with a larger would it be possible to also create a swap partition? Would that help performance any?

 

[rspray]

Keep checking slickdeals for cheap microSD cards. I got my 16gb polaroid for $13 after rebate. Its a class 2 but it benches like a 4 or 6.

 

[ofacto]

Keep checking slickdeals for cheap microSD cards. I got my 16gb polaroid for $13 after rebate. Its a class 2 but it benches like a 4 or 6.

Was that from the Fry's deal? I was thinking about picking that up but I already had an 8GB I got for $11 AR. Its also a Polaroid Class 4, but some people say its as fast as a class 6.

 

[lawman]

let's start a thread on this - cheap 16 gb sdcards.

 

[rspray]

[quote name='ofacto;16096]Was that from the Fry's deal? I was thinking about picking that up but I already had an 8GB I got for $11 AR. Its also a Polaroid Class 4' date=' but some people say its as fast as a class 6.[/QUOTE'] That's the one. Works fantastic.

 

[belosc0]

I opened my Novel up the other day, and it appears as though the 1GB internal memory is simply a MiniSD card. I didn't have anothe one, so I didn't play around with changing it out. Has anyone else tried a do-it-yourself RAM upgrade?

 

[lawman]

NECRO. merging.

 

[rokky]

Is the card mounted as /PD_Novel? That would seem to be what I am getting from "df" and "mount" output. It has the media sub-directories, ebooks, Music, Photos, Videos, and Digital Editions, and the total size is about right at 1GB with a vfat filesystem. Bumping that up with a higher capacity card would be nice for increasing onboard media storage since that is the default destination for many types of downloads.The /system, /data, /cache, /dev filesystems are all on /dev/block/mtdblock* partitions, so I suspect that is the SSD I think I have seen listed as part of the specs - probably about 1GB (like my OLPC XO with Fedora Core 11/Sugar/Gnome - amazing how much can still be squeezed into 1 GB). Those 4 partitions amount to about 600MB per df output, so 400MB as "spare" for upgrades, etc, makes sense - might be able to use some of that for non-permanent stuff, BUT NOT for swap, nor would I use any microSD cards for that (unless I monitored their inevitable degradation with plans to swap out for a new one several times a year at a guesstimate, and you would want the fastest possible card).Corrections - actually it is a 512 MB SSD based on this dmesg output:2.029303] OneNAND Manufacturer: Samsung (0xec)Muxed OneNAND(DDP) 512MB 1.8V 16-bit (0x58)OneNAND version = 0x0121Chip support all block unlockScanning device for bad blocksBad eraseblock 436 at 0x03680000Bad eraseblock 659 at 0x05260000Creating 8 MTD partitions on "onenand": [Partition/mtdblocknum, sizes in decmial bytes]0x000000000000-0x000000200000 : 0 "bootloader" 2,097,152 0x000000200000-0x000000a00000 : 1 "kernel" 8,388,6080x000000a00000-0x000000b00000 : 2 "id" 1,048,5760x000000b00000-0x000001500000 : 3 "recovery" 10,485,7600x000001500000-0x000001800000 : 4 "ramdisk" 3,145,7280x000001800000-0x00000e000000 : 5 "system" 209,715,2000x00000e000000-0x000014400000 : 6 "cache" 104,857,6000x000014400000-0x000020000000 : 7 "userdata" 197,132,288 TOTAL (dec) 536,870,912

 

[rokky]

To get back on topic, I found that any card put in there gets mounted on /PD_Novel, and vfat/fat32 that is the default filesystem for any such card I have bought is acceptable. FWIW, I tried putting an 8GB Patriot (thought that was good brand?) in, but it kept getting errors: "mmc0: error -110 whilst initialising MMC card" (love those Brit-icisms: "whilst" ;-). I had been using it in my WinMobile phone for months with no issue, and if I put it in an adapter SD card to put in the external slot there is no problem. I guess the contacts alignment/contacting is very "particular". I am getting a new 8GB Lexar card on sale today to try out.UPDATE: I got the Lexar card, and had a problem at first with it. The Novel would show a brief message, "Damaged SD Card" when it first started. I checked dmesg output about it in a terminal session, but that was looking ok vs the Patriot card. But I could not see anything mounted on /PD_Novel with df or mount in the terminal session, and could not download a gutenberg.org book file - "no space".So I connected the Novel to my Linux PC with the USB cable (no external SD card of course), and that showed some strangeness - I had to manually mount the partition. Then I saw no directories on the card (duhh, yeah, it's new), so thought to try just copying over the old 1GB card's contents:sudo mount /dev/sdh1 cf8-1 ["cf8-1" was leftover mountpoint dir in /media]sudo cp -pr PD_NOVEL/* cf8-1[bunch of messages about failure to preserver ownership that a vfat filesystem does not track anyway - no biggie]. . .df -h . . ./dev/sdh1 7.6G 86M 7.6G 2% /media/cf8-1/dev/sdd1 970M 85M 885M 9% /media/PD_NOVEL [original card]Unmounted/detached USB, rebooted Novel, and it was good - could open ebooks, and download more from gutenberg.org and B&N.Whew! Did any of the rest of you upgrading your cards have such issues?BTW, my unit had a copied set of instructions included by BB&B titled "Pandigital Novel - Customer Service Guide" with pix and text showing exactly (almost - the tape got a bare mention) how to open the back and re-seat the card if it exhibits issues like my Patriot card. So I guess this opening of the unit will not void the warranty. I found the main trick is to slide the big cover downwards using fingernails/tips (no tools!) gradually so the tape adhesion has time to release - about 1/8-1/4 inch opening seems to be all the space it needs for the tabs to disengage.Off-topic again: Why did the industry not stop their downsizing of these cards at the miniSD format? These microSD's are a lot harder to handle in situations like these with tight quarters, and are much easier to lose - I think there is still one lurking in my house that was "launched" by the ejection spring from an MP3 player, and that I never could find.

 

[Rocktopper]

Has anyone upgraded the micro SD card to a larger size?

 

[lawman]

Has anyone upgraded the micro SD card to a larger size?

Have you looked around the site at all? Seriously?I'm starting to think seniors are creating new accounts to play pranks...