It’s inevitable, One day your music, movies and games would have a limit, And you would either have to delete or move your files to a Computer or a cloud service. Previously, expandable storage was a thing. You see, people would buy a micro sd card( maybe a sand disk or a samsung card) and have enough space to store files and documents. Now, that feature sadly might become a figment of the past, As we saw with the loss of the poor headphone jack.The larger storage configurations of phones would be ignored, As people would just choose the mobile with the lowest storage and expand later by a cheaper Micro SD card. Smartphone OEMs have a reason for this though, Yes a reason that is beyond just saving a couple of dollars and trying to copy Apple. Now to the first question……
Do You Need The Extra Expansion?
This is a question you have to ask yourself before you choose between a Phone without SD card support. Now people often take pictures, Movies, Store games and also those rather heavy 4k Videos. If you use your phone as a kind of warehouse for files you should get a phone with an expandable option. Normally if you have a computer you could always store the big files there on the Hard disk of the computer. But if the phone you need doesn’t have a Micro SD slot there are some solutions to use effectively though. Luckily Phones are coming out with a Standard base configuration of about 64gb with phones like the OnePlus 6T with about 128gb Internal storage.
Why The Removal?
Hugo Barra, The Vice President of the popular Chinese smartphone producer Xiaomi and former Vice president Google’s Android Vision, Once said that Micro SD cards on phones wasn’t as convenient as widely speculated. This was a response to the question of why Xiaomi’s Flagships didn’t come with expandable memory support. In his words, he was reported saying:
“For high performance devices, we are fundamentally against an SD card slot.”
Now the flagship in question as of that time was the Mi4i, and he supported the motion with the fact that his development team would not sacrifice a ton of features, Like appearance, Battery life and a Hybrid sim slot( As developers usually opt for this instead of dedicated slot maybe to save cost) Also he was reported saying:
“Micro SD cards are incredibly prone to failure and malfunctioning of various different sorts,”
He’s right on this one though. Due to the fact that there are lots of Fake Memory cards in the market. And Micro SD card failure is quite rampant in mobile phones.
Sometimes a phone’s malfunctioning might be SD card related. Yes, the constant freezing, loss of information and “Unfortunately Android Has Stopped” are most likely as a result of a Memory Card present in the device. So in essence, A Phone with Micro SD would be more prone to Crashes than one without. That’s why Phone OEM’s usually don’t use expandable memory on their flagships. They might use on their Budget/mid-range but not their main phones.
Normally Internal storage is a lot faster than an expandable option. The UFS( Universal flash storage) Since its introduction in 2011 by standards body JEDEC, the aim of UFS has been to provide ultra-fast read and write speeds for mobile devices, using less energy in the process. You gcan’t really compare this advantage to an ordinary card slot. That’s why Hugo suggested that Micro SD Cards are slow. This is the complete quote of the Vice President:
“You think you’re buying like a Kingston or a SanDisk but you’re actually not, and they’re extremely poor quality, they’re slow, they sometimes just stop working, and it gives people huge number of issues, apps crashing all the time, users losing data, a lot of basically complaints and customer frustration.”
Additionally:
“It’s gonna be a while before you finally accept that maybe the reason why it’s not performing is because you put in an SD card, right? You’re gonna blame the phone, you’re gonna blame the manufacturer, you’re gonna shout and scream and try to get it fixed, so many different ways until you say, ‘Actually, let me just take the SD card out and see what happens.”
Now that’s an answer from the developer perspective, But for us there’s a really big reason under the diplomatic answer.
From A User:
The main reason developers are ditching the Micro SD cards is because of Money. Of course developers can’t charge you for an SD card but they can charge you more for a higher storage configuration. Remember when we said that due to
SD cards, That higher storage configurations were ignored? The lack of expandable memory support would force the user to plan his storage through out the life span of the phone.
On a bigger picture this would mean that a user would most likely try to purchase a mobile with a higher internal storage to satisfy his needs. Now, from an economical view this would be a good idea, judging from the fact that a higher storage form would cost about 100$ more, when it costs about 20$ to build a Micro SD card slot.
Also on the VP Hugo barra’s SD card opinion:
“It is a trend: SD cards will disappear.”
Also Google’s Vice President of design at that time Matias duarte actually said that SD cards are “Confusing for the users”
Whether SD cards are a trend is what we don’t know, As in the headphone jacks and removable batteries. Now to the solution…
How to deal with no SD card slots on Phones:
Like suggested above, you could use your computer as a storage warehouse or option for your files. You would then connect your smartphone to your PC and transfer files when needed.
Another option is Cloud Storage.There are quite a few cloud storage services to use such as One drive, Google drive or even Dropbox. If you are looking for unlimited storage and for free, you can always count on Hive, Only if you can stand the swarm of Ads.
Lastly, You could use a Micro Sd card adapter, which you could plug into your Phone through the Micro USB port or get one that supports Type C. Like This.
Or you could just use a wireless type for convenience.
Note:
The two last options might not work for everyone, as smartphone OEM’s usually use tweaks in their Software to cut off Detection completely.
Now With a conclusion, what do you think about the disappearance of SD cards? Do you see it removed or extinct in the future? Share your thoughts below:
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