declared size of phone memory card.

[johnthehappyguy]

Can anyone help ?

My son has a Nokia 6230i phone, he got a 32mb card with the phone about two years ago.
The display on the phone said it was a 33mb card.

He has now got a new 512mb sandisc MMC mobile card.

The display on the phone says the card is only 489.8 mb

Is there a simple explanation for the difference ?

Thanks

[erratic-eric]

The missing space is being used for formatting and system information.

[ducasi]

Funny that the 32 should appear bigger than it actually is...

The way these cards are made, when it says 32MB, you get 32MB, likewise 512MB.

As EE says, formatting, etc., can reduce the available space, but I've never known it to increase...

Is the phone really just telling you the amount of free space in total?

[Mr Darcy]

32Mb is 33,554,432 bytes. The phone probably take the number of free bytes left and divides by 1,000,000 to get 33. The larger card needs more space for the index information so shows less? Possibly there are also some files on there that the phone isn't showing.

[johnthehappyguy]

thanks very much for the information - my son was most impressed