I just got a 7135 a few days ago, and it is positively wonderful. It is not nearly as fast as my T3, but having my cell phone & palm be the same device more than makes up for the slower speed. I am a big fan of flip phones & graffitti, so pretty much I will only use a palm phone if it's got these two features. I don't think this even leaves me any choice other than the 7135.
Anyhow I had tried using photosuite on the 7135, and after loading about 400 pictures onto an SD card I found the program to be intolerably slow. It would take about a half hour to start up! Once it got going, it paged from one picture to the next at a halfway decent rate, but that half-hour startup time is a deal-killer. So I poked around on this board, and it seems that Acid Image is the consensus image browser to use. I've installed it, and the performance is quite good. I love the feature of being able to just clump jpgs together in a folder on the card, then when I run Acid Image I can check that one folder and hit slide show. This is perfect, as I can make lots of albums by just dumping files into folders.
While the picture rendering speed is usable, it would be really nice if it could be faster. Would a high-speed SD card be any help at all, or would the speed be exactly the same? It would be well worth my money even if it would be, say, 25% faster, but of course if it's exactly the same speed then there is not that much point.
Acidimage rules. But if you have large (like a few 100 KB or larger) jpegs, the loading speed is intolerably slow. This is probably a limitation of the 33 Mhz processor, not a problem with AI itself or the SD card. I upgraded from a standard speed 256 MB SD card to a 1 GB high speed card and didn't notice any difference in loading speed. Still, there are a couple of options to get images to load faster:
1. Compress your jpegs to smaller sizes. Since the screen is only 160 x 160, there is no point in having a higher-res image, unless it is a map or something you want to zoom in on. But loading still takes some time.
2. Convert the files to uncompressed bitmaps (.bmp). Since there is no "computing" to be done when loading the image, it loads much faster. The drawback is that since the image is uncompressed, the file size is larger. Still, a 160 pixel x 160 pixel x 2 byte (16-bit color) file is only 50 KB in size, so you can store over 5000 of them on a 256 MB SD card.
The slow SD card interface is a well know problem with the 7135 that essentially nothing can be done about. If you experiment a little, you will find that, in general, data in the 7135 internal memory is transferred much faster than the same data in the external SD card memory. So, the problem, as bobodobo points out, is not with PhotoSuite - retrieving large image files from an SD card will be slow no matter what viewer app you are using. The suggestion to compress the images that are stored on the SD card is the way to go. However, PhotoSuite has another problem that I found unacceptable in that it always overscanned the images so that you could not see all of the image without moving it around on the screen. That is one of the reasons why I, like bobodobo and many others, use AcidImage.
WOW, I just can't imagine storing 400 images to be viewed with the 160X160 screen!!
Photosuite is fine for my purpose - I only have about a dozen simple images stored because detail gets lost so quicky in the low res. So I have them all stored internally.
I doubt a higher speed CD card would help as much as resizing the photos to 160 by 160. The speed of the SD card slot kind of limits the transfer speed though others have said that it is noticably faster. Acid Image renders the images very fast as well so combine that with a resized image and I think you'll have the best combination.
mg
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