USB Card Readers?

[silverthornne]

Hi all,

I'm looking to buy a Honeycomb tablet and have narrowed my choices to the Iconia A500 and the Toshiba Thrive (the Lenovo Thinkpad seems good too but I don't see it in distribution yet and I need it soon).

Basically, I'm interested in a device I can take with me for an upcoming trip and check my DSLR photos on the go. The main advantage of the Thrive in this regard is the full size SD card slot. However, if the Iconia can read from a USB card reader (or the camera itself) , that advantage is negated.

Also, it looks like the Iconia's charging cable can be hooked to a USB wall charger. Is this right?

Thanks.

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[TekNinja81]

The main advantage of the Thrive in this regard is the full size SD card slot. However, if the Iconia can read from a USB card reader (or the camera itself) , that advantage is negated.

Also, it looks like the Iconia's charging cable can be hooked to a USB wall charger. Is this right?

Hey,

Not sure about reading directly from the camera -- that'd depend whether the camera requires a driver etc or not, but I've read some posts from people who've done it -- but it will definitely read from a USB multi-card reader. I've been doing this to transfer my own pics/videos etc. The only situation where I could see it possibly not wanting to work, is if it's one of those readers that shows 4 drives instead of just 1, but that may still work.

As for hooking up to a USB wall-charger? I don't believe so -- the A500 has a dedicated "pin-type" charging port. It doesn't charge via USB, at least not when I tried hooking it up to my PC. Unless it needs a high-output charger... its dedicated AC adapter is a 12V, 1.0A output, not USB's 5V/500mA standard.

 

[silverthornne]

As for hooking up to a USB wall-charger? I don't believe so -- the A500 has a dedicated "pin-type" charging port. It doesn't charge via USB, at least not when I tried hooking it up to my PC. Unless it needs a high-output charger... its dedicated AC adapter is a 12V, 1.0A output, not USB's 5V/500mA standard.

Ah, but the end of the cable that plugs to the AC adapter is USB then? Just wondering since I have a portable USB charger that can output 1.0A and I think it may be able to charge the Iconia.

Thanks for the info!


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[TekNinja81]

Ah, but the end of the cable that plugs to the AC adapter is USB then? Just wondering since I have a portable USB charger that can output 1.0A and I think it may be able to charge the Iconia.

Nope, it's one solid cable/adapter unfortunately. Keep in mind that USB standard is 5V, whereas the A500's charger outputs 12V. So very unlikely that you'd be able to find a way by which to charge via USB sadly.

I do wonder if maybe there is some way to enable it, which would be awesome... but if the A500 requires that 12V of power to support itself+charging, seems unlikely.

 

[silverthornne]

Ahh, ok. Seems to be a problem with many of these tablets needing a dedicated charging cable.

Thanks for the info.

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[silverthornne]

Anyone tried an SDXC card through a card reader on the A500. Those are the ones I use on my camera and thus are what I need the Iconia to be able to display. I already checked that the Micro SD Slot doesn't support that format (bummer, but this tablet is the only one I've seen that uses DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2 so it's a good tradeoff) so I just wanted to be sure about that detail.

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[TekNinja81]

I can't vouch for the Iconia's support for SDXC cards, but I would assume that as long as the card reader itself supports the standard, it would work. The card reader would more or less "translate" the SDXC file system so that the Iconia can read it, providing it's in FAT32 format. But since Windows will generally prevent you from formatting anything over 32GB as FAT32 and will want either exFAT or NTFS, you'd have to be careful about formatting it...

 

[silverthornne]

I think the camera formats them as FAT32. So if it's just the card reader that matters I'm set on the tablet I'm gonna get. Now just gotta wait for payday!

Thanks!

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