SD Card Deal Breaker

[Tazfiend]

For the second time I have ditched thoughts of upgrading my Galaxy because of the lack of SD card. If a third generation passes with no SD card I will, with regret, be looking to ditch Samsung entirely. This cheap attempt to drag more money out of customers, by removing a basic piece of hardware, is a deal breaker for me. 

I have over 150Gb of photos on my SD card, going back to the days of my Nokia N95. Cloud storage is not a practical option for quick access. (I run my own backup cloud server, with a fast link, I'm no luddite). For anyone who likes fast access to local files an SD card slot is an absolute requirement. 

Please Samsung, wake up. Stop spoiling otherwise great devices or lose custom. 

[RXM]

I'm on the fence with this one personally. I agree that for all the space it would take within a phone it's entirely doable. However I'm over the whole MicroSD card thing now, even the fastest ones aren't all that fast and are so annoyingly small for my clumsy fingers that they pale in comparison to USB C thumb drives or best of all SSD drives such as the Samsung T7 SSD drives which is way faster at transferring, you can connect to the USB C port on the bottom with the right cable.

You can do backups this way, keep a thumb drive as a keyring attached to your keys so you always have one on you for on the go backup/access of files as mentioned and fast SSD drives to backup at home. But I've had failures of drives and memory cards before, so I still prefer cloud storage though as nothing can go wrong. Regardless of how many backups on drives around my house I have I could always have a catastrophic fire destroying everything, and my photos are too precious to me for even the 1 in a million chance of that occurring.

So a while back I purchased 5 years of Microsoft 365 cloud storage for £199.95. I get 6 accounts each with 1TB of storage and all the Microsoft Office apps. I share them with my family however but one could split the costs with family then this is the equivalent of £6.66 a year per person for 1tb of storage. The deal arises several times a year at Argos (£39.99 for the family Microsoft 365 deal + 1yr McAfee Total Protection) and every time I have room to extend it (5 years is the maximum I can stack) I get it as I never know if the deal will come to an end suddenly and increase in price. If you don't need the anti-virus you can resell to make it even cheaper or use if you like. That deal or the one that's 15 months with either McAfee Total or Norton 360 included for £52.99 and that one shows on Amazon sometimes. Just a cheap option for anyone wanting to move to cloud storage.

[Tazfiend]

I do incremental cloud backups, to my own server. But that's a backup, not fast access. Cloud storage has had failures, "nothing can go wrong" is incorrect, and even if it's reliable the point about rapid access remains.

USB C access would be acceptable, but only if they built it within the phone structure. It's no use to me having a dongle hanging off the phone the whole time.

If the base version of the phone had 256Gb, it MIGHT be forgiveable to exclude internal storage upgrade options. As it is it appears to me just a way to force me to either pay more for a larger phone, or pay for upgraded cloud storage that doesn't do the job anyway.

[RXM]

Yeah totally agree with you. Fast access storage is far superior and the speed at which base storage has been doubling is incredibly slow, held back no doubt by Apple's refusal to increase their base storage option from 64GB for ages which is a paltry amount. Now they have base 128GB I hope to see next year that the base for other providers is 256GB minimum. I'm annoyed that in the US this year Samsung offered free storage upgrades from 128GB to 256GB and same for 256GB to 512GB plus $200/$250 store credit to people purchasing the S22 Ultra. People could then use that credit on the new Samsung Tab S8 Ultra 256GB (which had a 25% off bundle deal) and get that tablet for $699/$649 with the credit. I used a VPN to check and also Honey the browser add on found a code to make that tablet a further $100 cheaper and gave me $100 cashback. Not that I bought either as they wouldn't get updates or have warranties over here but that's the sort of promotions people really want.

UK gets 5% bundle price reduction making it £1044.05. US got the far more compelling promotions, regardless of the Honey deal I came across. We should also be getting free upgrades to 256GB and 512GB instead of free buds that have been given out free so many times you can pick them up 1/3rd of retail price brand new on eBay.

I'd still argue MicroSD's are barely fast access storage though. Maybe for photography but now with Samsung's 108MP photos and the ExpertRaw photos increasing the photos sizes by a large degree files are becoming larger and especially with phones now able to take 8k video, MicroSD's aren't that great. I'll still likely be buying a Samsung Pro Plus 512GB MicroSD for a tablet I'm buying but only because I won't be using it for that.

I'm OK with Samsung charging £50 to double fast access storage but once it starts creeping too much more i'm not into it.

[antikythera]

I just bought a Nokia G50 smartphone and am glad I did. It's an awesome piece of kit for £209 including extended warranty and a rear clear silicon cover. It is slightly old fashioned design wise but battery life, performance and call quality is very good. The camera isn't the best but I don't really need it for that as I have a Canon Eos. My G50 has a MicroSD slot and headphones jack. I have only used 22GB of the 64GB internal and most of that is the Android install and apps anyway. I may get a 64GB card for my FLAC files

[Sniffer]

Funniest thing I've read all day.

[antikythera]

Get the funnies where you can

[Members_XZzcajF]

The lack of external memory for the s22 is the reason I've just returned my s22.  I had a s20 ultra.  I transferred all the data over to the 512gb s22 ultra and realised I had run out of space.    This was massively unacceptable.  Yes maybe I should have bought the 1tb but I assumed wrongly I would be able to add memory to the s22 like I could with the s22 ultra.  My mistake for not being switched on to these forums.  However,  this decision by Samsung makes me really angry.    Android phones should have the ability to add memory on the fly.  Without this ability it feels to much like an apple phone.  And that's not good.

[AndrewL]

@Members_XZzcajF: I'm sorry to hear of your disappointment. Have you thought about backing up any non-essential media, such as photos and videos, and deleting them from your Galaxy S22 Ultra? If you head to Settings > Accounts and Backup > Backup and Restore > Google Drive > Backup Data, and follow the on screen prompts, then this will backup your personal media to your Google Drive account, allowing you the chance to free up some space on your phone. I completely understand that you would prefer to have a physical backup option, but I strongly recommend checking out the available cloud storage services such as Google Drive and OneDrive to help you manage your data. 

[Wrathmelior]

If my phone breaks I want my photos, videos and music to be safe on my sd card. I will not use cloud storage, I don't want them to have any more of my data (no one cares about privacy anymore??) and i'm certainly not paying extra for a worse storage system (requires data). I have always loved that all I had to do when upgrading my phone to get all of my content was to pop my micro sd card in the new device. Samsung insists on these horrible curved edge screens, they took away the micro sd card and the 3.5mm audio jack. My S10 is dying and i'll be looking elsewhere for my next phone.