There needs to be a law mandating expandable storage in phones.
The market will regulate itself, the consumer decides with his/her/* money, feel free to start your own company producing it (with your own money) \s
Sorry for that.
I know this is sarcasm, but I still have to also point out that companies literally conspire with each other to undermine the consumer’s ability to choose. Remember when Apple removed the headphone jack and Android vendors mocked their decision for all of one year before immediately following suit? That’s 100% intentional and planned from the start. They know we want to vote with our money, which is why they do everything they can to make sure we don’t have that choice.
That has nothing to do with a conspiracy, it’s just cheaper. If they can get away with it, they’ll do it.
Reality is, most people give relatively thought to their purchases. They just buy “the new iPhone” or pick an Android that seems reasonable to them. And even those who do ostensibly care, often enough only care about specifications. More cores, more nits, more camera.
I don’t really see it as a conspiracy. What seems to happen is Apple does something like remove the headphone jack. Apple users essentially have to accept it as they are locked in and don’t have any choice in the matter. Plus you have the fanboys that have an amazing ability to rationalize anything Apple does. Everyone else sees that Apple got away with something, and they follow suit.
Losing the SD slot would still be annoying but not as big of a deal with everyone wasn’t also copying Apple’s model of massively overcharging for storage upgrades.
Not that I think it was a good reason for ditching them whatsoever, but one of the main reasons given has a tiny bit of merit:
Allegedly, a lot of users often cheaped out on SD cards and then used them as adopted system storage where they moved all their apps to. This had the effect of completely tanking phone performance and then they would often get corrupted after a bit of use taking user data with them. This then generated a load of negative reputation about the devices being slow and unreliable, when the problem was the choice of SD card, and generated a load of wasted money in supporting these users when that happened (think unnecessary RMAs, etc).
Personally I think they should just have restricted it to A1+ SD cards, and sucked up the people complaining about their bargain bin Scrandrisk SD not working. But I guess they saw an opportunity to have their cake and eat it by just removing it and charging a premium for larger storage skus.
Question is rather: why does Android not allow any distinction between Internal and external/removable?
My downloaded media files belong on the SD card, but APKs, sqlite DBs and temp files don’t belong there. But de facto, it’s just used as an extension for internal storage. That’s just stupid.
Sometime around android 9 they removed a bunch of sd card related features to make you have to do the weird combine with internal storage thing
There is a UFS-II specification and even a PCIe version specifically for micro SD cards. It was all planned out, and it would have been trivial to tell consumers: “Yo need card with more contacts as shown in picture”. But no, the biggest manufacturer of flash storage is samsung, and they decided they’d rather sell higher storage capacity phones as a premium. Easy to do when you’re the second biggest manufacturer of of phones and apple already paved the way.
I literally never heard or read about a user say that when using an sd card. They just took it out to charge more for more storage.
It’s not the users saying it, it’s the OEMs. Back when this was a new discussion, I at least remember Google saying this as justification for why it stopped including them in their devices after the nexus 4
HTC released a phone this year that had expandable storage AND a headphone jack
AND it came with a charger in the box.
I gonna have to wait and see if they actually support this phone but if they do and continue to release phones like this (and ditch the curved glass screen) I would be totally down to switch.
What phone is this? I thought they released one but no jack. I’d be interested if it has one and an unlockable bootloader.
Nevermind. Just saw your post under.
Yes, the joke in the meme is that Sony is the only “flagship” company that still has those features.
(Though calling them a flagship company might be a little generous)
As for HTC, it’s possible that another company bought the rights to the name, i’m not sure. They were making VR headsets for a while, so it’s possible they just backed out of the phone market and did something else.
Either way, the phone looks good, with some minor tweaks and some proper long term support it could be a serious competitor
another advantage of the glorious fairphone
My fp4 has been very disappointing so far tbh, after a year or so of using it it’s slow unresponsive and the mic doesn’t work
It’s not supposed to do that. My FP3 got unresponsive after a while as well. The trick was to open it up and gently tighten all screws.
I have experienced that the microphone is in a weird spot on the left border of the phone, frequently where my fingers are placed when calling. So maybe check if you’re covering it too!
I have no issues like that. Maybe your microphone is damaged. What has been bugging me is the top speaker sounds terrible.
Seriously, I’d also recommend to unscrew the screen and screw it back together. For me it made wonders. And if this also doesn’t bring you anything, you should text support - in the end you have a warranty for a reason, right
It’s a fp4 so older and I got it second hand so unsure if the warranty still applies
Will definitely try with the screws though
The few advantages you mean, wouldn’t mind the FP if they’d use a processor that wasn’t years old and at least performed better than the Tensor G2 (A processor highly regarded as absolute crap)
When SD card is the only criteria for a ‘high end’ phone
It’s not. Maybe I worded it poorly. I mean that Sony is the last smartphone manufacturer where the high end line got MicroSD slots. The others removed them. (Google doesn’t count, they never got one)