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Nokia Claims a Memory Card Slot Would Have "Defiled" New Phone
nk497 writes "Nokia unveiled its flagship Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 handset today, but it doesn't feature an SD card slot. There's a reason why: Nokia's designers didn't want to 'defile' the design. 'We started with the premise that we wanted an uncompromised physical form,' executive vice president Kevin Shields, said. 'To put an SD card slot in it would have defiled it.' He said most people don't use the storage in their phone, although the Nokia Lumia 820, which has only 8GB of storage, does include a micro-SD card slot behind its removable cover, which Shields claims doesn't compromise the design."
Defile, in this case, means "make useful for longer than the two years of the carrier subsidy". Nokia doesn't want to kill sales of their next phone with this one. Just like Apple.
Except that Apple will be here two years from now. We can't be that sure about Nokia.
I still have my n900. Gee, what could have been, if they hadn't been such cowards!
Bruce Perens.
How come a SIM card is blended perfectly with the case but a Micro SD card -which is smaller- "defiles" the design?
Some people listen to music on their phone, or watch photos on it....
Perl Programmer for hire
has a microSD slot on the side under a cover next to the SIM card. Ingenious design.
IMHO, the only thing that could defile a phone these days would be the name Nokia on it. Or Blackberry.
Or Windows 8.
Silence is a state of mime.
Yup, that lack of SD slot sure killed the iPhone. And the iPod.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sorry, this is yet another example of why the tastes of slashdot readers are basically irrelevant for any manufacturer today. Users don't care about MicroSD slots, the lack of one does not hurt sales and most people who have MicroSD slots in their phones have no idea what to do with them. Yes you can get cheap 64GB SDXC cards for $60 or so, and it's criminally stupid to not have MicroSD slots (or just offer large storage at a reasonable cost). But users don't care. Google realized that, so did Nokia.
They are pretty stupid. The first thing I did when I bought my phone was spend even more money on the biggest SD card it would take. I will, in all probability, never remove it from the phone - or at least, I never have removed them from my previous phones.
That means for me, the SD card just makes the phone bulkier, more expensive, and more prone to failure. I'm sure there are people who actually use the removable storage, but certainly it appears that I'm not alone.
How is it making it more expensive? When there is no external storage, your phone price jumps in disproportionate amounts to the memory it has onboard. I suppose if you like paying $100 extra to get an extra 16GB on your phone, then having an "undefiled" phone will make you happy.
I'm also a bit baffled how a slot makes the phone "bulkier" - SD slots don't really add much to the thickness, and if anything, we've learned that phones CAN get too small (form factors for most things don't tolerate being shrunk too much).
What I'd prefer to see is all smart phones come equipped with SDXC slots, perhaps one internal (battery slot) and one external.
Except that you either wouldn't have as much storage with a fixed internal memory or would pay a huge premium for it.
Phones come with expansible memory because each one wants a different capacity, and the manufacturer would be stuck selling a low capacity high volume model and a high capacity low volume one, satisfying nearly nobody.
Rethinking email
When my friend's Android phone broke, she or he was able to transfer all the data to a new phone with a simple physical process. When I broke my iPhone, I was screwed.
Of course, iCloud makes that less painful now. It horrifies the parts of me that value privacy, so I keep them away from the smartphones.
Uh, your friend should have had backups in iTunes of their settings and all of their content in iTunes.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.