Brian & Anand Hate SD Card's in Phones

[poofyhairguy]

I'm not trying to question if you should or shouldn't demand an SD card slot on your phones, that's your business. What I want to know is why you all feel the need to bring your entire music collection around with you on a daily basis, and why you have entire movies on your phones? I want to sympathize with you guys but I just don't understand your motivations or usage models.

Lol, not my entire music collection. That is like 1TB. I just carry with me a handful of podcasts, the audiobook I am listening to, and a few albums that I have been listening to recently. That adds up quickly.

As far as TV shows and movies, those are useful for plane trips or waiting rooms (when I remember to bring my bluetooth headphones). Also that is an easy way to placate my young nieces and nephews. Just put it into Airplane mode so they don't accidentally answer a phone call. You need a lot of space so you can just play the full 1080p mkvs and not mess with re-encoding stuff.

Other things I store on my SD card that are large- PSX games, large Android game downloads, every picture from my last three phones, backups of my apps/phone (via nandroid and Titanum), hold our wedding movie and graduation movie for random family, and use foldermount to use my SD card as the default place for phone downloads.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

So the phone is the primary media outlet for these people and they consume so much media daily that they need massive (to me it is) amounts of storage space for their daily media needs?

I want to put maybe 2-4gb of MP3s on my phone to have a decent collection that I can listen to ANY time I want... Also, after 7 months with an iPhone I filled it with 6gb of photos. That would be 10gb of multimedia that would've vaporized my Nexus 4 16gb's available space. It would be nice to have that on an SD card instead. Plus, 1080p videos take up space (for recording)

 

[Megatomic]

Ok, that matches my usage pretty well. My iPhone has 16GB of internal storage and no slot as you all know. I have 2.x GB free at any given moment and could definitely use a bit more storage, especially if I know I'm going on vacation or will be travelling for work. More internal storage would be best for me, but an add-in card would work too. I just don't think the lack of an SD card would cause me to feel that an otherwise awesome phone was completely worthless as a result.

 

[WelshBloke]

So the phone is the primary media outlet for these people and they consume so much media daily that they need massive (to me it is) amounts of storage space for their daily media needs?

Why shouldn't it be? You've got a miniature computer in your pocket that can interface easily with other devices. Why not use it to the full?

Ok, that matches my usage pretty well. My iPhone has 16GB of internal storage and no slot as you all know. I have 2.x GB free at any given moment and could definitely use a bit more storage, especially if I know I'm going on vacation or will be travelling for work. More internal storage would be best for me, but an add-in card would work too. I just don't think the lack of an SD card would cause me to feel that an otherwise awesome phone was completely worthless as a result.

It wouldn't make it worthless to me either but I'd definitely choose something with expandable storage or large amounts of built in over something with 32GB or less.

There's plenty to choose from I'm not going to limit myself to too little storage. A device doesn't need to be worthless not to sell, it's just got to be a little bit worse than the alternatives.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Ok, that matches my usage pretty well. My iPhone has 16GB of internal storage and no slot as you all know. I have 2.x GB free at any given moment and could definitely use a bit more storage, especially if I know I'm going on vacation or will be travelling for work. More internal storage would be best for me, but an add-in card would work too. I just don't think the lack of an SD card would cause me to feel that an otherwise awesome phone was completely worthless as a result.

Surely not. I mean there is some benefit to being able to easily copy stuff over via MicroSD adaptors but the real benefit is space. I am totally willing to do without if you give me the space, like a 128GB phone for a reasonable price. Heck even 64GB will do. But almost no one gives that option at reasonable prices.

I flip out what is on my SD card about once a week. It helps me deal with my 45 minute (EACH WAY) commute each day. Without it my phone would still get used, but the extra space means I can manage it less often, which makes my life easier.

Now not having a removable battery? Yea, sorry, that makes a otherwise cool phone lame no matter how nice the glass/aluminum on the outside is (that I will cover with a case anyway) or how much the construction can avoid gaps (lol).

 

[Megatomic]

Why shouldn't it be? You've got a miniature computer in your pocket that can interface easily with other devices. Why not use it to the full?

While on the road - yes. On a day in/day out basis - I personally don't have the need though some may.

There's plenty to choose from I'm not going to limit myself to too little storage. A device doesn't need to be worthless not to sell, it's just got to be a little bit worse than the alternatives.

Point taken.

 

[Megatomic]

Surely not. I mean there is some benefit to being able to easily copy stuff over via MicroSD adaptors but the real benefit is space. I am totally willing to do without if you give me the space, like a 128GB phone for a reasonable price. Heck even 64GB will do. But almost no one gives that option at reasonable prices.

I flip out what is on my SD card about once a week. It helps me deal with my 45 minute (EACH WAY) commute each day. Without it my phone would still get used, but the extra space means I can manage it less often, which makes my life easier.

Now not having a removable battery? Yea, sorry, that makes a otherwise cool phone lame no matter how nice the glass/aluminum on the outside is (that I will cover with a case anyway) or how much the construction can avoid gaps (lol).

I put 6GB of music on my iPhone, but I'm thinking that I am going to reduce that to 3GB. My phone is through work and I have true unlimited data usage, I can stream up and down to my heart's content. I'll save the extra 3 GB of space for pics and video I shoot of my family.

Now the battery argument... I can see that need a bit more clearly, though my usage model allows me to recharge as necessary.

 

[ControlD]

I put 6GB of music on my iPhone, but I'm thinking that I am going to reduce that to 3GB. My phone is through work and I have true unlimited data usage, I can stream up and down to my heart's content. I'll save the extra 3 GB of space for pics and video I shoot of my family.

Now the battery argument... I can see that need a bit more clearly, though my usage model allows me to recharge as necessary.

That makes a huge difference. If I had unlimited data then I believe 16GB would be plenty of storage for me honestly. I use Rdio for almost all of my music listening these days, but my wife and I share 2GB of data per month (Verizon's standard data plan). Because of this I tend to sync a lot of music from Rdio to my SD card so when I am in my car or out running I can just shuffle a decent amount of music.

It's really sad that now we actually have the speed to utilize "the cloud" we also now have such restrictive data caps that make the cloud almost unusable at the same time.

 

[dawheat]

I'm not trying to question if you should or shouldn't demand an SD card slot on your phones, that's your business. What I want to know is why you all feel the need to bring your entire music collection around with you on a daily basis, and why you have entire movies on your phones? I want to sympathize with you guys but I just don't understand your motivations or usage models.

I've had over an hour commute each way via regional rail for the last 5 years. I like having a couple dozen viewing choices for whatever suits my mood - all in HD. I have Netflix, but it's not nearly as convenient or reliable for parts of my commute.

I like having the choice for any situation - and it's still only a fraction of my entire movie library.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I've had over an hour commute each way via regional rail for the last 5 years. I like having a couple dozen viewing choices for whatever suits my mood - all in HD. I have Netflix, but it's not nearly as convenient or reliable for parts of my commute.

I like having the choice for any situation - and it's still only a fraction of my entire movie library.

Good point on the reliability. On my commute I have this one dead spot that always hangs Google Music. It is very jarring.

I mean, "unlimited" LTE is nice but that doesn't help me on 90% of my long trips.

 

[Megatomic]

My unlimited is "only" 3G but free is free and it's fast enough for TuneIn Radio Pro. Youtube can be fun though.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I'm not trying to question if you should or shouldn't demand an SD card slot on your phones, that's your business. What I want to know is why you all feel the need to bring your entire music collection around with you on a daily basis, and why you have entire movies on your phones? I want to sympathize with you guys but I just don't understand your motivations or usage models.

I don't put my entire music collection, but I put ZERO on my Nexus 4 simply because there isn't enough space. If I put 3 albums, I might want access to 10, then what? If I put 1 podcast, I then might want more. I might as well just not listen to any of those and not cause a craving because the space is so limited.

With that said it's not even about putting entire movies on my phone. It's the fact that I can go around and not worry that today I want to film at 1080p to capture the awesomeness at some concert and run out of space. I might look back and wonder why I recorded that because video quality sucks on a phone and the sound is too loud, but who cares? I should have that freedom right? I shouldn't have to worry that any time my phone will fill up and I need to go free up some space before my next vacation.

Currently, the SD card allows that. Onboard storage does not--unless of course we start getting some 128gb phones. The fact is we've had 16/32gb phones since 2009 with the iPhone 3GS. Cameras have gotten MUCH better where people are using iPhones as their primary camera on vacations. The same with video. The 640x480 video back in the day is now Full HD and far higher quality. LTE is ages faster than the congested AT&T 3G in 2009. We're talking 10-20x faster too. It only makes sense that we have those storage increases.

I don't think SD Cards are the root cause of the problem. It's just a matter of having enough storage, which can be fulfilled either by giving us an SD card slot so we can buy cheap storage, or by giving phones with more reasonable storage.

 

[sweenish]

[...] so we can buy cheap storage [...]

I think that's another reason Google has moved away from SD cards. "Confusion" aside, too many people were buying absolutely shoddy cards and wondering why their entire phone's performance was going down the drain.

 

[Zxian]

Good point on the reliability. On my commute I have this one dead spot that always hangs Google Music. It is very jarring.

I mean, "unlimited" LTE is nice but that doesn't help me on 90% of my long trips.

And this is a complaint you should be having with your carrier - not your phone manufacturer. Telecoms in North America have been getting away with providing terrible service because people manage to find workarounds or say "that's just the way it is."

 

[blairharrington]

I'm not trying to question if you should or shouldn't demand an SD card slot on your phones, that's your business. What I want to know is why you all feel the need to bring your entire music collection around with you on a daily basis, and why you have entire movies on your phones? I want to sympathize with you guys but I just don't understand your motivations or usage models.

The 64 GB iPhone 5 was my first smartphone that allowed me to carry around my entire music collection (50 GB) at all times. Why do I need all my music with me 24/7? Because personally I find it invaluable, that's why. I don't have unlimited data on my cell plan so streaming when I always want to listen off wi-fi is out of the question. I don't want to pick and choose music for offline use. I want to select what I want when I want.

Sometimes I take weekend road trips in my car with friends. We pick out music on my phone and listen via bluetooth car speakers. On a long flight I might not have access to wi-fi. On the Acela train you can't stream music on their network. When I'm abroad (I go to Italy every summer for a month) I don't need to worry about using my data with the local SIM for listening to music. It's a luxury that once you have is difficult to give up. Why should I compromise if I don't have to?

Like I said in a previous thread, SD cards allow you to transfer media from one smartphone to another easily if they both feature said slots.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I know that for me I'll be voting with my wallet. Apple, HTC, Motorola, whatever will never see a cent from me until they give me expandable memory and a removable battery.

All this bullshit was perpetuated by Apple with their form over function philosophy. What people don't realize is that there really isn't any sacrifice in form if you still include the functionality of expandable memory and replaceable battery. The limiting factor in form really is just human ergonomics. And we can definitely have all the function we want while still having a product within the bounds of human ergonomics. It's not like we're trying to make a phone the thickness of a blade or something.

People who live in an area where they can stream absolutely everything and everything are rare. I live in such a region, but I can certainly appreciate the pains of people who live in a place with only 2G or 3G internet and they have to rely on residential WiFi to first download and store their media somewhere.

I have 64GB on my phone and can store entire multi-season TV shows on my phone and play them all back in HD without a problem, from ANYWHERE. I can take as many photos and videos as I want. And I can swap out my battery at will when it's low and have zero sacrifice in my phone's original form factor.

 

[WelshBloke]

Ok, who started the reddit thread?

 

[Zaap]

So the phone is the primary media outlet for these people and they consume so much media daily that they need massive (to me it is) amounts of storage space for their daily media needs?

That's the thing though, these aren't "massive" storage amounts (people have just been brainwashed to think of 16/32 GB as "massive" amounts all of a sudden since it's a mobile device.

Yet if I sold you a laptop with 32GB of storage, you'd probably freak out wondering how the hell you're going to ever do anything with it without shuffling files around to make room. Even 64GB is piddly.

But the fact is, people end up using the same file types/sizes on a smartphone as they would on a desktop (movies, music, photos, pdfs, ebooks and documents). Add to that, just a few decent sized games, navigation with offline maps, etc. and you start seeing gigs of space just vanish.

The day I wouldn't care so much if my phone has an SD slot or not, is the day phones START at around 128GB and go up to 512, even 1TB and more of internal storage. (As it is right now, I'm rocking 96GB with my Note 3 and it strikes me as the least I'd want to settle for).

For me personally, it's not that I carry around so much of any one file type, it's that I don't want to worry about storage space for anything. So if I want 6 or 7 big games with huge data files? Fine. Shoot some HD video without limiting myself? No problem. Carry a reasonable amount of movies/music/books around with me, along with all the rest of it? Again, no problem.

Otherwise, I personally don't understand the concept of a 'smartphone' that forces me to use it in what I consider 'dumb' ways, as if storage wasn't cheap and readily available.

It's like someone else here said well: going along with the pretense that plentiful mobile storage is an expensive luxury, is just playing into some corporation's BS that's trying to force me into cloud services/data usage.

No thanks. I know better. I'm not playing along. It's not 1998 any more, file sizes across the board are larger and more varied, and storage space IS cheap and plentiful. Yes, even for phones. Everything to the contrary of that is an illusion for the sake of someone else's bottom line.

 

[Oyeve]

That's the thing though, these aren't "massive" storage amounts (people have just been brainwashed to think of 16/32 GB as "massive" amounts all of a sudden since it's a mobile device.

Yet if I sold you a laptop with 32GB of storage, you'd probably freak out wondering how the hell you're going to ever do anything with it without shuffling files around to make room. Even 64GB is piddly.

But the fact is, people end up using the same file types/sizes on a smartphone as they would on a desktop (movies, music, photos, pdfs, ebooks and documents). Add to that, just a few decent sized games, navigation with offline maps, etc. and you start seeing gigs of space just vanish.

The day I wouldn't care so much if my phone has an SD slot or not, is the day phones START at around 128GB and go up to 512, even 1TB and more of internal storage. (As it is right now, I'm rocking 96GB with my Note 3 and it strikes me as the least I'd want to settle for).

For me personally, it's not that I carry around so much of any one file type, it's that I don't want to worry about storage space for anything. So if I want 6 or 7 big games with huge data files? Fine. Shoot some HD video without limiting myself? No problem. Carry a reasonable amount of movies/music/books around with me, along with all the rest of it? Again, no problem.

Otherwise, I personally don't understand the concept of a 'smartphone' that forces me to use it in what I consider 'dumb' ways, as if storage wasn't cheap and readily available.

It's like someone else here said well: going along with the pretense that plentiful mobile storage is an expensive luxury, is just playing into some corporation's BS that's trying to force me into cloud services/data usage.

No thanks. I know better. I'm not playing along. It's not 1998 any more, file sizes across the board are larger and more varied, and storage space IS cheap and plentiful. Yes, even for phones. Everything to the contrary of that is an illusion for the sake of someone else's bottom line.

Well said my man, well said.

 

[thedosbox]

Yet if I sold you a laptop with 32GB of storage, you'd probably freak out wondering how the hell you're going to ever do anything with it without shuffling files around to make room. Even 64GB is piddly.

Only because Windows needs most of that for itself. The last time I looked a non-skinned install of Android takes up about 4GB.

 

[pm]

Nice post, Zaap. As Oyeve said, "well said".

I'm not much of a fan of SD cards - mostly because I've had weird experiences on older versions of Android trying to figure out what apps were running out of which space. But I agree that vendors are artificially limiting memory sizes in phones to maintain their margins. And I respect that other people like SD card slots... personally my next phone will need 64GB...

 

[poofyhairguy]

For me personally, it's not that I carry around so much of any one file type, it's that I don't want to worry about storage space for anything.

Exactly. I get by with a 16GB N7 but I have to manage it, do things like copy every Nandroid backup once completed to my server. Nice to fire and forget.

When you add in Anand's Law that 20% must stay free to keep good performance and its even harder to manage.

 

[lopri]

If the storage space weren't in demand, OEMs wouldn't be able to charge $100 per each incremental increase. SD cards may be going out of fashion, but then why should consumers pay such premium for storage space? Same goes for the cellular modems that cost perhaps less than $5 ea.

Now, I know someone will say something about supply and demand, free-market, blahblahblah, but then we don't need reviews, either, since the market will speak for itself. The topic here is that reviews pick and choose what to advocate and they are not always on the consumers' side. Increasingly so.

 

[WelshBloke]

... The topic here is that reviews pick and choose what to advocate and they are not always on the consumers' side. Increasingly so.

I'd rather reviewers just review what's there and leave it up to the reader to decide if that's a negative or not.
It's got so I just skim reviews just looking for any glaring problems and then just look at the specs.

 

[poofyhairguy]

If the storage space weren't in demand, OEMs wouldn't be able to charge $100 per each incremental increase. SD cards may be going out of fashion, but then why should consumers pay such premium for storage space? Same goes for the cellular modems that cost perhaps less than $5 ea.

Now, I know someone will say something about supply and demand, free-market, blahblahblah, but then we don't need reviews, either, since the market will speak for itself. The topic here is that reviews pick and choose what to advocate and they are not always on the consumers' side. Increasingly so.

It is weird that Apple's standard of the only upgrade in mobile being storage has remained the standard. It is kinda cool that the cheap model gets flagship guts, but I think it has artificially kept storage sizes down. MicroSD slot is the way around that, because then market forces apply and great storage is comparatively cheap. But only really Samsung plays that game. HTC/LG upped the minimum finally, but more needs to follow in Android including Google.

Its the weird part of the phone industry and the reason I hope Moto's modular phone takes off. Upgrade more than one thing sounds nice.