UPDATE: Here is the first pic. At this point, I have actually used up about 1.5GB of space on the card, so I should expect to see something like 6500MB available on the Memory Stick. So I go to the menu, select the settings menu item (lower right corner), and scroll down the "General" Tab to the "Phone Status" menu item, and click on it. What do I see? I see that on the phone itself I have 69 MB free. The K790 has 80 MB of phone memory in total, but a lot of it is used up by garbage that came with the phone. The thing that probably strikes you, and depending on how much you know about programming, even may frighten you - is that the "memory stick" is showing only 4095 MB free. My quick math above suggested there should really be about 6500 MB free. Am I missing 2500 MB?

Here is the thing. Whoever wrote the function call that checks to see how much memory is used up on the memory card had to store that value in a variable. The 4095 MB Free tells me (a programmer) that the type of variable they used was an unsigned integer - a 36 bit variable that stores a number anywhere from -34,359,738,368 to +34,359,738,368. The number 34,359,738,368 represents the number of bits. There are 8 bits in a byte, so if we divide that number by 8 it tells us how many bytes we are talking about: 34,359,738,368 / 8 = 4,294,967,296 bytes. to find out how many Megabytes that is, we divide it by 1024 x 1024. which gives us 4096 MB.

That tells us a few things. If the phone couldn't see the card, or was presuming it to be a 4GB card instead of an 8GB card, we should expect to see it telling us that there are only 2500MB (or so) free, since I used up about 1500 MB already. But because we don't see that, but instead see 4095 MB, my presumption is that the phone actually sees the memory on the stick, but the function call that returns the value to the "phone status" program isn't big enough to hold the whole value - so it just returns the biggest value it can: 4095.

To test that theory, I exited the "settings" menu, and instead went to the "file manager" menu (that folder on the left side of the first menu third from the top?), and as soon as I was in, I selected the "more" option on the right, and scrolled down to the third item on that little list - "Memory Status". The screenshot here tells a different tale altogether doesn't it? Whoever coded the call to the memory stick here did a better job, because it is reporting the actual remaining memory - 6593 MB.

I haven't had any problems with the card. It does take a little longer to start the apps because there is more card to read - but that isn't really all that annoying. You may note that in the background of the last screenshot some of the content on my card - SpongeBob videos, two Star Trek (The Original Series of course) DVDs that I ripped from my personal library, etc. Yes. I am a geek. I made the theme too, though these particular screen shots don't do the theme justice.