An SDHC driver for Palms? If Dmitry says so . . .

(Off-topic alert: This post isn't about Microsoft, but then, life isn't entirely about Microsoft, is it?) Putting a 32GB SDHC card into a Palm Life Drive may make no more sense than putting a racing engine into a Model T, but if Dmitry Grinberg says he can do it, I believe him.

I'm a proud Life Drive owner. But Palm isn't paying much attention to anything that isn't a smartphone these days. So my Life Drive, and even the TX, which Palm still sells, are being ignored to death as technology passes them by. SDHC support, for SD flashcards bigger than 23GB, in particular, is an increasingly obvious omission, and one Palm apparently isn't doing anything about. As 32GB cards become common and prices plummet for 8GB cards, I feel . . . left out.

If you're a Palm owner who feels the same way, cheer up. There may be a solution. Dmitry Grinberg has offered to step in and rewrite the Palm SD slot driver.

This isn't an easy task, which is probably why Palm isn't rushing to do it. The high-capacity cards are the same physical format as older SD cards, but they use a different memory addressing scheme, so the driver would have to be entirely redone – while maintaining backward compatibility with SD cards.

So why does Dmitry Grinberg think he can do what Palm doesn't want to? Maybe it's because he's already created a handful of valuable Palm utilities. See his PalmPowerups Web site for things like Blue Pill security for your Treo or WarpSpeed to overclock your Palm processor.

Grinberg announced he was going to do SDHC for Palms a year ago, but then he got busy with other things and it just didn't happen. But this week he apparently got tired of people whining about no SDHC for Palms and said on the 1src mobile forum that if 100 people would promise to buy an SDHC driver for $20, he'd write it.

I took the pledge immediately, and you can, too. You'll need to sign up for 1src, then go to the poll page to add your ID to the list. (If you want catch up, you can read the discussion thread that started this all out.)

According to the Brighthand mobile blog, Grinberg hopes to get this done by the summer.