I let my colleague John handle most of the geek-tech travel gadgets on this blog because I have little patience for long instruction manuals. I’m the guy who uses a phone for a year before he figures out that it has some cool feature hidden in level four of the “settings” menu.

When someone from SanDisk reminded me that those little microSDHC cards can be used to move hundreds of songs from my computer to my phone, I figured it would be a royal pain in the rear. “But I don’t have an adapter,” I said as an excuse. So she sent me an adapter. Well, two actually.

The first adapter looks like the regular (larger) SD cards most digital cameras use. You slide the microSDHC card into the adapter, put the whole thing into any card reader (on my HP laptop that’s built in), and then you just transfer files over to the card via the adapter.

The $10 MobileMate Micro Reader adapter is for more easily-found USB ports. Once again, slide the teeny card into it, plug it into any USB port, and transfer over the MP3s.

Even for my wimpy and annoying Nokia phone I got free when signing up with AT&T, getting music on the phone was a simple process. Now if I’m ever somewhere without a music player, I’ve got one anyway with my cell phone. Even cooler, this homemade card works in the slotRadio player I reviewed a while back. So if you get sick of the preloaded cards you can buy for the slotRadio player, you can switch it out and put in your own tunes.

One caveat though with the phones: some of them will only accept a regular SD card up to 2GB and these SDHC cards are a different format plus they go from 4GB to 16GB. If you put one of these into a phone manufactured before 2007, you will probably get some cryptic message about formatting and you’ll spend an hour online trying to figure out the problem. And of course if your phone doesn’t have a microSD slot you can’t use this method at all—which means you’re stuck with what the manufacturer gives you for storage capacity. That’s one huge drawback of the iPhone or iPod Touch: they want you to buy more capacity from them via a more expensive device, not via storage cards that will keep getting cheaper.

But most of the newer mobile phones have a slot because this is also where you store photos, videos you shot, or voice memos. Most non-Apple smart phones also have a micro card slot. Check the nifty SDHC compatibility wizard on the SanDisk product site before shopping for your device.

The SanDisk microSDHC cards list for $32 to $109 on their site, but you can usually find them on sale for less at one of the following online retailers:

SDHC 8gb card with adapter or 8gb card with USB adapter at Amazon

Search Buy.com USA and Canada

Search J&R Computer/Music World