Android unusable, were my expectations too high?

[benpope81]

Is the board really so fragile about SD cards?

There shouldn't be any crashing, but the performance difference cards can be 100x for small random reads, and that includes branded cards that meet modern standards, because the standards only talk about sequential performance.

That means something that takes less than a second on, say, a Samsung Evo, may take over a minute on a SanDisk U3.

So yeah, application not responding is very likely, although it may get there in the end if you're patient enough or it doesn't forcibly timeout.