Just got a new phone courtesy of work, a Nokia N73, but with no memory card, so I decided to invest in a decent-sized mini SD card for it. MyMemory.com are doing their own brand 133x 2GB cards for £17.99 + P&P, which seemed like a good deal. I know their claims about speed are extremely optimistic (I've got a 133x MyMemory CF card, which is noticably slower than my 120x Transflash cards), but speed isn't a major concern in this case.

Well, the card arrived promptly, and worked when I put it in the phone, but when I formatted it (I like memory cards to be formatted in the device they are to be used by), it wouldn't format. I managed to get it formatted on my old Minolta camera (which takes SD cards), and used it over the weekend with no problems. However, today when I tried to copy a large amount of data to it, it was being really slow, and then started causing IO errors. Clearly not a good sign. I can't format it on the phone (still) or under Win XP, so it's going back to MyMemory for a refund. And next time I'm going to buy a decent brand.

Meanwhile, the Nisis graphics tablet has been a touch tempermental again. Although it was apparently working fine, when I tried it in anger with Photoshop, the cursor stopped responding to the pen input after a minute or so or use. I think that following a reboot of my PC and a few harsh words, it seems OK now. Annoyingly, for another £20 or so, I could have bought the cheapest Wacom tablet, which I'm fairly confident would have been a lot less trouble.

The moral of these tales? You get what you pay for. I should know this - I stopped buying cheap outdoor/walking stuff and cheap tools a long time ago for exactly the same reason!