Ask Owen

I recently got myself a new Nexus One which runs Android. It came with a tiny little data card that slots inside the phone, but I can’t figure out how to read this with my computer. I have a card reader that has a variety of slots, but nothing as small as this card. Any ideas?

The type of card you’re talking about is called a microSD card and is a popular choice amongst phone manufacturers. It’s a tiny card and you can get microSD cards storing up to 32Gb of data. As you say, the card is really tiny, measuring 15 mm × 11 mm × 1 mm and is a quarter of the size of a standard SD card. You will find that your card reader will take standard SD cards as this is a pretty common format to use, but you’ll need an adapter to read microSD.

Adapters are usually pretty easy to come buy, because most retailers tend to sell them together with any microSD card you buy. For example, The Kingston 2Gb microSD card shown alongside, which is on sale from Buy.com at $6.99 (including shipping), comes complete with an adpater that can be used to read other microSD cards. One solution would be to buy a cheap one of these and use the reader for both cards.

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