On Our Desk - 13

PNY 2GB MicroSD

Manufacturer: PNY
UK Price (as reviewed): £10.36 (inc. Delivery)
US Price (as reviewed): $7.99 (ex. Tax)

Here’s how work gets handed out at bit-tech: an item comes in for review and the first person to say they want it, gets it. Usually people stick to their speciality and the others are far too busy to pinch the games off my desk, but occasionally there is some overlap.

Thus, when this little SD card came in, I jumped on it like a red-shirt would jump into the path of phaser fire in an episode of Star Trek. There were two reasons, firstly I wanted something else I could load some DS homebrew onto, and secondly I wanted the free mobile phone game that comes with the card.

You see, this is abbreviation central right here and PNY has teamed up with EA’s mobile phone division to offer everyone who buys one of these cards a free mobile phone game. With an increasing number of mobile phones using MicroSD card expansion, it’s an offer which makes sense too – and lawd knows I’ve been after some decent mobile phone games for a while.


The MicroSD card itself is the usual old lot, with a decent 2GB of storage and a SD card adapter and carry case included to ensure you’ve got some basic connectivity with protection.

Of course, if you don’t have an SD card reader on your PC then the SD card adapter is going to be a bit of problem and you might want to invest in one. It’s that or putting your MicroSD card in the adapter, putting that in a digital camera and connecting your camera by USB to the PC and using it as a card reader, which we’ve been forced to do in the past.

To test our card out we loaded it up with the latest R4DS firmware, shoved DS ports of Doom and Quake on there, as well as the latest alpha of DSWikipedia, and took it for a whirl.

And it worked, beautifully. No errors, no issues and no slow transfers – everything worked perfectly.


The same turned out to be true of the EA mobile phone games offer, which is fulfilled by SMSing a short code off to EA. I’ve had bad experiences with EA’s mobile phone games division before, but I’m happy to say that there weren’t any problems here.

The selection of games is pretty comprehensive too even on my somewhat outdated O2 Cocoon there was a choice of about twelve titles, ranging from a The Simpsons themed quiz game, FIFA ‘09 and The Sims 2: Pets through to Tetris and my eventual selection of Orcs and Elves.

Orcs and Elves itself is even a pretty OK game by mobile phone standards, proving to be almost a direct copy of the DS version but without all the screen-scratching and £30 price tag. Of all the games included in this offer, my guess is that it’s this or FIFA that’ll appeal most to bit-tech readers, so while the game is a tad linear and dull rest assured that it is at least solid and allows you to save wherever you want.

Verdict: The PNY 2GB MicroSD card does exactly what it says on the tin and though it might struggle to stand out, at least you get a free game included. Plus; cheap as chips!