WINDOWS PHONE SD CARDS HOW TO
WINDOWS PHONE SD CARDS PASSWORD
WINDOWS PHONE SD CARDS PC

Okay, so now we know how to resuscitate cards that we're removing from Windows Phone 7 devices, but that's only half the problem the other half is that we don't know what to replace those cards with. Needless to say, be sure to keep a Nokia-equipped friend close by for as long as you own your WP7 gear.Д«ut what constitutes a certified card, and why can't we get them yet? Yes, the card was erased, but in this case, that's seriously all we wanted - we just wanted to bring the card back to life. So how does Nokia come into play here? Well, it turns out that Symbian is one of few platforms that is designed to handle a secured SD card properly - and sure enough, we were amazed to discover that we were able to use an N8 to recover our once-dead microSD card when seemingly nothing else would. It's not a simple matter of formatting, it's a lower-level operation than that. Sure enough, Windows Phone 7's card security situation explains the problem - put simply, a secured SD card attached to a machine that isn't set up to read it is very locked down, and most devices aren't equipped to decrypt or erase them.

WINDOWS PHONE SD CARDS PC

We couldn't see it on a PC or a camera, either. It's not that we could see it but it couldn't be formatted. When we removed the card from our Focus and stuck it in another phone, it couldn't be seen.

WINDOWS PHONE SD CARDS PASSWORD

By its design, a password-secured SD card (or microSD card in this case) can be read only with the password otherwise, your only option is to erase it. After the format, the phone randomly generates a password that it stores in its internal Flash and then uses to secure the card, essentially bonding the card with the phone. One of our tipsters reminds us that the 'S' in SD stands for 'secure,' and though most platforms don't make use of SD's security features, Windows Phone 7 most definitely does.

We're told that on the first boot after a reset, the phone checks the inserted card and formats it - but that's not all that happens. Worst case, you lose data and you need a factory reset as far as we can tell, there's no way to end up with a paperweight. Whoops.Д®ven so, from the phone's perspective, it's still not the end of the world if a card gets swapped. Apparently, employees raised concerns early on that customers would be removing the cards and causing all sorts of drama in the process, and the official call was that manufacturers should glue the cards into place somewhere along the line, that message was lost, and the Focus happened with a fully user-accessible slot. That's exactly what Microsoft had in mind.

Bear in mind that manufacturers occasionally use internal, non-user-accessible SD or microSD cards simply because they offer greater flexibility than soldered-on chips do - companies merely need to swap out cards to offer different SKUs of their product with different capacities. Read on.ДЇirst off, Microsoft had never intended Windows Phone 7's storage to be expandable, swappable, or removable. How did it get to this point? Why wasn't it communicated to users that this was such a problem before the phones ever went on sale? And if it really is such a problem, why did Samsung dare to make the microSD slot user-accessible in the Focus the first place? All good questions - and in talking with a number of sources the past few days, we've pieced together some of the answers. There are many reasons to be excited about Windows Phone 7, but a bleak spot has been Microsoft's message - or lack thereof - on user-expandable storage, and the situation finally came to a head last week when AT&T told Samsung Focus owners to hold off on buying microSD cards altogether until Microsoft had a chance to certify some for use with the platform.

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