My New Smart Phone - Bad Flash Memory - Micro SDHC

My two-year mobile phone contract was up.  It was a good opportunity to try out a smart phone at about half the price of an unlocked, unsubsidized unit (I'm still keeping my old phone for voice use). I chose a T-mobile branded phone called the MyTouch 3G which is made by HTC Corporation (as the HTC Magic).  HTC has been making smart phones using the Microsoft Windows Mobile OS for almost a decade. Windows Mobile is based on the Windows CE (Consumer Electroncis) platform. With the debut of Google's Android OS  about two years ago,  HTC began making phones for several operators (T-mobile, etc.) and also for Google itself (the Nexus One ).  The Android OS is based on modified Linux Kernel.  Linux is a family of Unix-like OSes which feautre true pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory and other features of a modern OS.  Android is available as open source under the Apache License. 
The phone uses  capacitive "touch screen" technology. There is no physical keyboard.  The "virtual' keyboard  supports tapping gestures but it's usefulness is really improved with the "Swype" input method.  Without lifting your finger, you can trace out the letters of a word - you don't have to be too accurate.  The shape of the trace is matched against stored shapes which are associated with words in a dictionary.

The MyTouch phone connects to the internet via Wi-Fi or the mobile phone network (3G, GPRS, etc.).  Since I don't have 3G service from T-mobile,  I use  Wi-Fi.  I do have voice service using a prepaid SIM, so I can make voice calls on the phone - it's not really designed for prolonged use against the ear - quite ungainly. So a headset (wired or Bluetooth wireless) is recommended.  The phone comes with a wired headset.   The phone has a GPS receiver and a electronic magnetic compass built-in. 
The phone is google centric.  Native apps include the google maps feature which uses the GPS and compass features to guide users to the results of searches - e.g  bank branches, restaurants, etc.  The google mail service, gmail, also has a native app.  But, the key application is the web browser.  This allows non-native web-based apps such as web-mail, mobile aware websites, and full web pages to be viewed and used. 

The Micro SD HC  memory card that came with it was causing error messages in reading and writing from the camera and music player apps.    Take a look at the image of real one (from the Sandisk website) and the one I have. You'll notice the "speed class" is not really a number like 2, 4 or 6 . It's kind of a reversed 3 but it looks strange. Also notice that the real one has a tiny trademark symbol next to the and above the "k" in SanDisk. 

The good one