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From: Arno Welzel <usenet@arnowelzel.de>
Newsgroups: misc.phone.mobile.iphone,comp.mobile.android
Subject: Re: What's the actual *advantage* of not having an sd slot?
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2025 21:26:10 +0200
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Marion, 2025-06-15 20:00:

[...]
> Note that Arno spread the nonsense that the only use of sd is for expansion
> memory, and Arno spread the nonsense FUD about bad memory blocks, but that
> just shows Arno doesn't understand what an sd slot is and why it's there.

Well - SD cards are memory. So why do you say it is nonsense that the
main use for SD cards is to have more memory in your device?

I've been working in the IT industry for more 30 years and also develop
software for Android (also see <https://github.com/arnowelzel>) -
professionally and in Open Source projects.

How many SD cards did you use in your life? As part of my job I used and
tested a few hundreds of them over the last 20 years. And yes, some SD
cards *do* fail unexpected and not all smartphones work fine with every
brand of SD cards.

> All else being equal, a phone WITHOUT the sd slot is always a vastly
> substandard phone than one with it *for the user*.
> 
> That's because it's *impossible* to replace its functionality without it.

Well - when I have 128 or 256 GB memory built in to a phone, I don't
have to replace anything. It is just there.

[...]
> To answer your question, it's *impossible* for there to be an advantage to
> the user but it's clearly a huge financial advantage to the phone makers!

For me it is an adavantage to have internal memory which can be accessed
with 200-300 MB/s compared to just 10-20 MB/s which is usually provided
by SD cards. Yes, having an *optional* slot for an SD card may be useful
for some cases - but I don't see the absolute need for this any longer
compared to the past days where a device without an SD card was more or
less useless since the available internal memory was sometimes even less
than 4 GB in entry level devices (like the HTC Wildfire S with only 512
MB memory which required an SD card just to be able to use the camera
for more than just a few pictures etc.).


-- 
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de