Install programs to device or card?

[Guest newtonmj]

Hi everyone,

Ever since my first smartphone/PPC I've stuck with the habit of installing all 3rd party apps to the device, as opposed to the storage card. I think I probably did this initially for two reasons - 1) It allows me to change/remove cards and still have functioning programs, and 2) I wondered if there was any speed benefit from running the programs of the device as opposed to the card - I can only assume if there are speed differences then the device must be the quickest location.

However, over time I have decided that reason 1 is not really relevent for me given I only have the one card and many of my apps (e.g. TomTom) rely heavily on the given card being in anyway. So, I'm wondering about reason 2 - is it valid? Can anyone categorically confirm that there could be a speed differential between running applications from/on the device as opposed to from the card? I appreciate that with a single-file binary the whole lot is likely loaded into memory so once loaded/running it'd make no difference, however I'm thinking perhaps more of additional/supporting files (libraries etc) that the program may call - would these benefit from being on the device as opposed to the card?

Finally, one reason for me raising this question is simply that I have bags of room on my (expandable) storage card however am of course limited on the device.

Mathew

Edited February 15, 2007 by newtonmj

[Guest rhedgehog]

Not a great deal of differece that i have ever noticed, except for programs that load at startup, like today screen plugins.

When the phone boots, the card is not accessed until a second or two later when the drivers activate, and so this can slow down the boot times a tad, but other than that, I have never noticed a difference.