Apple has been doing it for a while now with its iPhone editions, but recently most major phone manufacturers outed or will have
flagship models without microSD card slots.
In the slideshow below we have listed some major handsets that force you to make do without more memory than their makers supplied internally, and upon making it we realized that this is getting epidemic now.
That is why we wanted to ask if you approve this obvious trend, and to what extent the good ol' memory card can be swapped for the newly-minted cloud storage services most major smartphone manufacturers are now trying to make us stomach.
Is it all an evil plot to make us sign up for cloud storage and tied up even further in the respective mobile ecosystem, so that we never leave, or is it just for cost-cutting/space saving reasons? Fill in our poll below and sound off your arguments in the comment section.
Phonearena polls
- Are you OK with the lack of memory expansion slot trend of flagship phones?
-
No biggie, 16/32GB locally are more than enough for me
25.85% (420 votes)
(420 votes)
-
With the new cloud storage services, the lack of memory card slot is irrelevant
6.03% (98 votes)
(98 votes)
-
I'm a digital hoarder, so I need all the space I can get, both online and offline
25.97% (422 votes)
(422 votes)
-
I'll never buy a phone without memory card slot, more so since I don't use the cloud for privacy reasons
42.15% (685 votes)
(685 votes)
1625 votes
Flagship smartphones without memory card slot and their cloud storage services
Flagship smartphones without memory card slot and their cloud storage services
HTC is overhauling its cloud services, as it recently announced, and asked all
HTCSense.com backups to be retrieved since the thing will be shutting down in April, replaced by something new. To soothe the lack of memory card slot pains in the flagship HTC One X, the company offers 25GB of free Dropbox cloud storage for the duration of your warranty with the new HTC Sense 4.0 phones, which will be tightly integrated into its award-winning user interface.
The Sony Xperia S has many virtues, but having expandable memory is not one of them. The company hopped on the no-memory-card-no-removable-battery bandwagon right with its first multicore handset, and never looked back.
Sony is still working on its cloud service that will supposedly integrate with its music and video streaming ones
across all of its consumer electronics, but the
free 50GB of cloud storage promotion from Box is apparently still going on for Xperia phones.
While you wait, though, Sony has supplied the Xperia S with generous 32GB of internal storage out of the box, so you'd likely not miss the memory expansion slot here at all.
Being a Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 900 was never expected to have a slot where you can just pop any microSD card and balloon your internal storage to new heights.
Still, it is coming with 16GB of storage only, but Microsoft intended to push its mobile OS phone owners to the SkyDrive cloud service anyway. It offers 25GB of free storage and syncing of your Office documents with it, so Windows Phone users have an escape route when it comes to storage expansion.
Apple fired the first shots in this battle by including a memory card slot in neither of its already 5 generation of phones. The company is notorious for being a control freak over its gadgets, and only including features it deems worthy in them. Not to mention the markup game it plays, charging $100 for the difference between the 16GB and 32GB iPhones, while a 16GB microSD card goes for about $15 at the moment.
Apple started offering its iCloud service with the iPhone 4S, which gives you 5GB of storage for free, and syncs your photos, music, documents and other data with the service, thus somewhat removing the need for extra local storage.
Samsung caused quite a stir when the Galaxy Nexus was announced without a microSD card slot. "
It is supposed to be the poster child of Android and no expandable memory? Could it be that Google is gearing up for an Android cloud storage service?" - that was people's reaction over this puzzle.
Still, Verizon's version has the option for a 32-gigger, and just today there was a rumor that the
long-awaited Google Drive storage service is launching in the beginning of April, so there must have been some reason for omitting the microSD slot on the Nexus by Samsung, as the company always puts those in its Android phones otherwise. The rumored
S-Cloud storage service by Samsung got supposedly delayed, but we can't help but wonder if it will land along with the SGS III.
