Originally Posted by
N8ter No, that's one big issue. However if the device is partitioned similarly to Samsung Galaxy S phones you can move this stuff to the INTERNAL SD card, which is always assumed to be there (and indeed, always is) and not the External SD card.
RIM simply needs a unified storage model similar to iOS, WP7, and WebOS. Even Android's partitioning method is from the 90s and terribad, IMO.
Installing Apps to Removable Storage is only useful if it is done similarly to Windows Mobile - that is, the entire App is installed there (Apps that are services, etc. aren't allowed to be installed there in Windows Mobile). On Android moving an App to SD can result in anything from 10-90% of the App being moved. The Assumption that you can move a few big apps to the SD Card (some of them listed like "Email" cannot even be moved, that is a stock app unless I'm missing something) can free up 100 MB space is chuckle-inducing. If you get the right combination of apps you can end up only freeing 20 MBs. That's why App2SD on Android is a big of a joke, and every high end Android phone comes with more than enough App Storage (2GB with 1.5GB+ free after first boot) so that people don't have to use it.
Android App2SD is for low end and older Android devices that either don't have an Internal SD Card that Apps can load data to, or have No Internal SD Card and very low on-device App Storage (HTC Aria 320 MB App Storage Free vs. Galaxy S 1.67 GB App Storage Free after first boot).
Android Apps CAN download data to an External SD card. But the quality of that card is always up in the air so there can be random performance issues or crashes if the card isn't great and/or is failing. Lots of people buy large Class 2 SD Cards because they're cheap, and that can cause some issues with certain types of data (large textures and video files, e.g.). OEMs almost always use at least Class 4 Cards as Internal Storage, provided they aren't using NAND which is clearly superior.
EDIT: Also, Blackberries do use Sun's J2ME (they're free to develop whatever proprietary APIs on top of it, the same way you can develop your own [proprietary] APIs on desktop Java i.e. SWT vs. Native SWING libraries). Android DOES use a proprietary JVM-type architecture, and that's why they're getting sued - not RIM. Sun, especially, was not cool with people making similar/imitating products and calling it remotely Java. Remember J++?