Not exactly “news” but the recent Samsung Galaxy Ax6 phones (A26, A36, A56) all does not have the MicroSD card slot, only the Galaxy A16 still has it.
I fucking hate this. I love having a mini-TV with me. I can load up a Terabyte of TV shows I love rewatching. You know, maybe you travel or something. Also, good for recording like a lot of videos. Now, new Samsung phones cannot do that anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but honestly, I have to vent: Fuck Samsung. Fuck this capitalist bullshit.
I’m thinking of stop buying Samsung for the future, but honestly, other manufacturers might follow suit, so it ultimately might not matter. I hate this bullshit. I will carry a portable SSD if I have to, I ain’t buying your stupid cloud. I’m broke AF and I don’t got no money for subscriptions. (Also, they could hold your data hostage and refuse access for random “ToS” violations)
What are your thoughts? What’s the future of MicroSD card slots in phones?
(future looks so bleak)
No SD card, no 3.5mm connector, no purchase
I did that for years until there were none left.
Sony apparently has your back still
Sony still sells phones? Last I checked they were like $2k, obscenely tall, took terrible photos, and only got a couple years of updates.
My Moto G 5G has both
I see. Moto G also looks like it only gets a couple of years of updates. And the most important thing to me these days is the OS. So I get a Pixel with Graphene and the extra cost will pay for itself over time. Especially since all the new Android phones are more or less the same these days.
If there is no expandable storage, you have to buy the 2x expensive phone with more internal storage. That’s the game they are playing.
Step 1: Buy portable SSD
Step 2: Duct tape said SSD to back of phone, connect USB-C cable
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit?
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Not sure what the need to be a dick about this it, but I don’t agree that just because they are a “sliver of phone users” doesn’t mean what they’re talking about isn’t still important. It’s good for users to try and think of ways to keep things the least expensive for themselves, while increasing their technical knowledge. I’m seeing a lot of younger people without any basic knowledge of technology who are going to be at the whim of changes made by tech giants because they don’t know how to modify their own systems.
The more people work together and ask questions to try and grow as well as try and share their discontent with design decisions of those tech giants in hope others might take note and stop, the better. It’s a small effort by one person, but it’s more than just throwing up their hands and saying “just get a thumb drive and stop crying”.
I think it’s also pushing subscription based cloud services. To me, the SD card slot is a convenient backup target when away from home. It fits my 3-2-1 backup strategy. Without it, more people will consider backing up to paid cloud services, like how Apple does it.
For the record, I hate this trend. Hands off my sd slot and my 3.5mm jack. But I also want GrapheneOS or something similar. Can’t have it all…
Forcing you on to “The Cloud” (i.e. other peoples disk space) so your data can be rummaged through. I don’t like it.
That and they get unlimited money and/or force you to a more expensive model of a phone.
Sounds like the EU needs to mandate user expandable storage next.
Put it alongside the USB-C and replaceable battery rules.
The EU is the mother of consumers world wide. Some company is taking advantage of you? Get the EU on the line, someone’s knees are about to pop.
I’m still pissed about the this and morons over on Reddit actually defended it saying “NoBoDy UsEs SD CaRdS. UsE tHe cLoUd”
Yeah ok buddy, like I want to pay infinite dollars for a $50 SD card? What about shit I don’t want on somebody else’s computer? What about if I’m in an area with low coverage? What if I want root my device and have an emergency firmware to recover from?
Eventually the smarter people showed up, but fuck the onslaught of idiots that tried saying cloud storage was better than SD. The future is fucked if the current generation is this brain-dead.
Cool. More phones I won’t buy.
I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to “self-host” the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.
For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don’t take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).
I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.
It takes work to get setup, and it’s important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it’s quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.
While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.
Just get a Motorola phone, the stylus 5g has a micro SD and headphones jack for $250 on sale. I got one after I broke my last Samsung phone, and I was pleasantly surprised coming from S and Z series phones.
How is your mileage on that? I tried out the stylus last year but found the headphone jack was garbage. Took my earbuds to an electronics shop and found every Moto phone had bad jacks. Every non-Moto jack worked fine. For reference, I would play any sound at low volume and there would be a hissing/static noise in my buds.
Huh, mine have been totally fine, but I got a very late model, I believe around October or November. Perhaps they fixed it.
I agree that the future is bleak. I also agree that it makes life more difficult for those of us who don’t conform to this “I own nothing and pay a subscription for everything” lifestyle that people seem to be blindly moving in the direction of. I don’t pay for Spotify or any other streaming service (not that they even have all the music I listen to, I always hate it when people justify their existence with the “iT hAs EvErYtHiNG” line), I have my own music collection that I’ve curated over decades which is entirely offline. It won’t fit on a smartphone unless I pay a ridiculous amount of money for a model with tons of storage or convert my entire library to inferior quality. Ultimately it’s not a deal breaker feature for me so I do use a modern phone without external storage. I am fortunate that I own an MP3 player and multiple older phones with microSD support, including an XZ1 Compact which is what I currently use for portable music instead. It would be more convenient if I could just have everything on a single device like I used to, though.
Nintendo Switch 2 just got it’s 1tb MicroSD Express (1gbps write / 3 gbps read) card announced so I see a bright future for MicroSD technology.
Yeah, but I see it as a “premium” product going forward.
I haven’t felt the need for one in years, probably ever. My current 128gb phone is less than half full.
Most of my music is streamed on Spotify, and my personal library is available on Jellyfin. I could make a local copy if I really needed to, but I don’t really need to. I have one or two Spotify playlists that I regularly listen to and those are cached.
I don’t watch movies on my phone, the screen is too small. Again, Jellyfin, on my laptop, desktop, or TV.
I do take a bunch of pictures, and I use Google Photos, but even if I didn’t, I’d offload them periodically instead of letting them fill up my phone.
Stuff like backups or large file transfers I do over USB anyway.
Not having microSD isn’t a trend I like, since expandable storage with less reliance on cloud services and not being upcharged to move up a tier on internal storage is ideal. It is sad to see it is mostly dead over the years.
But, one good thing I do look forward to is the EU requiring user-replaceable batteries by 2027 that will hopefully make replacing batteries much easier than it is now. I miss the days when batteries could be popped out and swapped on the spot.
Might be expensive for the specs but there are a lot of pluses. On-the-go replaceable battery, no 3.5 jack though…
I’m quite happy with mine. Bought when the promotion was the extra battery.
I’m looking to switch from using Pixel phones to a more open alternate, I don’t know who I should order through to get these in Canada
I’m in the US and while Fairphone doesn’t sell the 5 here I was able to “import” it via Clover Technology.
Check with Fairphone if the phone is compatible with your carrier, and then order directly. Just a warning, check also about the warranty.
AFIAK you cannot get it directly to North America. You need a mail-forwarder. And of course, there’s no warranty. And if you need replacement parts, it also has to go through the mail forwarder.
And since they haven’t been “approved” they only work on 1/3 of the carriers, and T-Mobile could change their policy at any time.
Edit: Just checked the website, it only ships to EU countries.
Murena sells the Fairphone 4 (with e/OS) to North America, but not the Fairphone 5. Fairphone 4 is about to lose support in 2 years, so not really worth it.
Unfortunately us techies on niche platforms like Lemmy aren’t who these manufacturers make their money from. People buy whatever shit is put out in droves, and they haven’t been punished for removing things like the SD card slot and headphone jack.
Cling onto your old phone for as long as you can, because we are screwed in that department.
My LG V20 is starting to have serious issues running apps I need and I’m really bummed about it :(
I use syncthing to a second drive on my pc in case my phone gets lost or stolen. It just syncs when I connect to wifi. This sucks for people who take or store a lot of videos.
How does Syncthing solve OP’s problem?
You can move and store excess files and it will remove them from the phone.
I mean you can do that by plugging it into the computer and dragging and dropping files. The problem is they’re no longer on the phone…
Syncthing is automatic, so you don’t have to remeber to do that. If you’re taking a lot of videos I’m sure you wouldn’t need them all the time. I guess op could get a seed box.
I wish syncthing would work for me. Spent a week testing and trying to get it to work.
I’m using syncthing - fork on android and linux on my pc.
I might be an outlier on this one, but what was SD cards good for? Hear me out :-) It was good because you had a phone with 32GB storage (11.3GB free!). It also was good for swapping photos and films and such in/out of the phone.
I have a meager 128GB Storage space on my old phone, if I had to buy a new one (I buy used when I can) I’d opt for 512GB just to not nedding to care any more. I also have a ten dollar 64GB USB-A/USB-C key that I use to transfer stuff to and from the phone. I’m too lazy to set up a shared folder on my PC and maybe that’s a bit technical for some people but that could make things even more smooth.
So what’s your use case that absolutely needs an SD card nowadays?
Side note: they can try to pry the 3.5 jack from my dead hands though.
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For storing photos and videos, mostly. As OP mentions specifically, TV and movies.
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Removing SD cards was part of an overall strategy of extracting more money, because now they can absolutely take you to town for additional storage. 128GB SD card? $28 to SanDisk. 128GB upgrade for your phone? $200 to the OEM. 🖕
Nr2 for sure, it was all 32GB (unusable) on the budget phone or 128GB on the flagship.
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I have a phone with 128GB of space and an SD card with 256GB. To update to 256GB internal would have cost 250€ because price reductions often only happen on base models.
I have used 86GB of internal with the rest on the SD. That is near-zero photos, a few streaming playlists, 2 game apps, and almost no documents. Apps take up ridiculous amounts of space now because devs don’t give a fuck about space.
On my SD card I have used up 154GB of 256GB.
My music library, all of my photos and videos are stored directly on the SD card, backups from apps, etc…
See how 154 + 86 is way more than 128 and a 256GB SD card cost 30€ while to upgrade to 256GB internal would be more than 800% the cost? And the sum above would be at the limit of 256GB anyway? They didn’t offer a 512GB model.
The added benefit of if my phone dies or gets destroyed, the chance that I can just pull my SD card out and have all of my needed info including backups of my TOTP codes and everything without having to go to a multi-hundred euro recovery service.
Also the cost of getting more internal storage is not just the difference between the two models. Because as you said the 512GB model wasn’t even available when you bought the phone but in 2-3 years it will probably be the default. But by then you can’t just buy more storage like you would by getting a bigger card, you need a new phone.
That’s expensive! Kids phone got that +100€ 512GB a year or two ago when he needed a new one.
I’m no apple/samsung guy though so it depends I guess.
What if the SD card dies?
What if the phone dies?
The answer is always the same.
What if the user dies?
Obviously backed up to the chatGPT overlord!
Backups
All their backups are on the SD card.
I thought I was going to be that way with the 3.5 mm jack but once I bought a pair of Bluetooth headphones I’ve been chilling, they’re really good nowadays unless you’re going full audiophile with .flac files
“Bluetooth is good” is not a counterargument though. Because all the phones with headphone jacks also had Bluetooth. They took away headphone jacks and gave us absolutely nothing in return except coercing us into buying more expensive and disposable shit. I’ve been using the same $20 wired headphones for 7 years; can you say the same about your $150 BT buds? I got a pair of Pixel Buds A with my P7 and they died in <3 years.
I’ve been using the same $20 wired headphones for 7 years
Most $20 earbuds don’t make it more than a year, and that’s that I take good care of my stuff.
These are the ones I got (they’re $16 now) note the replaceable wire. Also added some Comply foam tips (not sure exactly which ones) and they’re so comfortable that I will forget they’re even there sometimes.
can you say the same about your $150 BT buds?
Yeah actually my Jabras are probably pushing 5-6 years right now. Maybe slight reduction in battery life but I never wear them for extended hours anyways.
Shrugs, I do use my FIIO BTR DAC sometimes (somewhat audiophile I guess), hooked up to my headphones. But only when the jack is not working as expected. Am I doomed?!
SD cards are cheaper than paying for more storage on the phone and easier to manage. I have mine loaded up with my entire music library and game roms for emulation as well as a smaller selection of movies. I spend a lot of time at work in places with little to k ow network so it’s great to have on hand. I could fill the storage on any phone available today but I’d be constantly dealing with space when I wanted to install a new app or take video or whatever. I prefer to keep my media library separate.
Well, new phones have 512GB so I personally doesn’t see the need for more storage, and double-usb keys make for easy transfers.
I mean I’m not against it, I had a 128GB SD card before, I just, personally, doesn’t feel the need any more (and I’m only having 128GB base storage).
As I said I can fill that with ease. Leaving no space for apps. If I have everything on the separate card that is a non issue. Using USB dongles is not a solution. It’s more crap we have to carry around when we already have an ideal method with the SD card. It takes up practically no space and offers great utility for those who need it. It’s not like they’re using the space on the board saved by taking it out to add new features.
If you fill up half a terabyte with ease, but not want to offload it on a usb key, well Xiaomi has a 1TB phone out 😅.
You’re right though, why remove something that small just because? Shitty move.
My current phone has an SD card slot but I never used it. I sync my photos to my server via wifi. In 2025 I don’t really see it’s point.
Also type-c usb drives and external hdds are common nowadays, if you just want to backup huge data via a wire, you can do that via it’s port. It’s more convenient plugging-unplugging an usb drive than removing the sd card, I use this feature occasionally.
