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Samsung Unveils World's First UFS Storage Cards, Could Replace MicroSD (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices. The UFS card is based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard and will be available in capacities from 32GB to 256GB. With a UFS card, users will be able to read 5GB of data, or a full resolution movie file, in 10 seconds, Samsung claims. For comparison, a UHS-1 microSD card would take 50 seconds to do the same. UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time. Samsung claims the 256GB UFS card has a sequential read speed of 530MBps. The random read speed is 20 times faster than a microSD card. The sequential write speed is about 170MBps, which Samsung estimates is two times faster than microSD cards. The random write speed is 350 times faster than microSD, Samsung claims. The Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard is intended to replace the eMMC standard, which is used in low-cost laptops and Chromebooks. Samsung didn't disclose pricing or availability for the UFS storage cards. It's worth noting that Toshiba does also make UFS storage cards, but they have yet to release any based on the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard.
Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.
Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.
UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.
Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?
The benefit to uSD is that it is backwards compatible to SPI flash by just hooking up to the right pins and clocking it accordingly.
If I'm not going to do that, then what benefit does this standard offer over an internal Type-C port, the next iteration of uSD, mini/micro-SATA, NG.4(??), or CompactFlash?
Seriously. CF gives you IDE support, uSD gives you SPI support, NG.4 gives you PCIe x4 support, and USB Type-C gives you up to 10 megabit USB support. Any price, space, and performance level is already covered. And most of those standards already have converters between them.
They do.
MicroSD slot is back in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge.
Looks like they realized dropping it in the S6 line was a mistake.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Just look at "USB". As soon as you look too closely, the quirks jump at you like fleas from a many dog.
What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.
Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist. Providing an upgrade path will keep people using your standard. By not making it backwards compatible there is a strong risk it will fail to be adopted.
They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable
If they want to sell more cards and hardware, keeping it compatible is the fastest way to do that. Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it. So they are pushing any possible sale to me out by a long time. On the other hand if the card is compatible with what I have already, even with reduced performance, there is some chance I buy one immediately.
I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.
I don't think it is good business at all. It think it is a very short sighted strategy that has been tried before and usually fails.
And the lack of OS upgrades is one of the big reasons why I tend to shy away from most Android devices (with some notable exceptions). While there is a lot I like about Android better than iPhones, Apple at least continues to support their products after you buy them which matters to me at least. (Given what Apple charges they damn well should support them too...)
Other than in the professional occupations is there really any need for a new format that is only 5x faster? Does the current top transfer speed cause latency with the devices that use it? Other than a speed increase is there anything else different that means we need to make obsolete all the microsd format and switch to this new one?
My SanDisk Extreme USB memory stick is rated to read at 245MB/s and write at 190MB/s. In real life performance, it comes pretty close. $20 from Amazon.
So, you can read a movie file (an hour or so of video) in 10 seconds, which is vastly better than the inferior older standards which take almost a minute...
Somehow, I'm not seeing myself losing sleep worrying about my inferior older devices....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Android is geting better support to offload appstore to the external Card and The SD cards we have today is noticable much slower the internal flash. This will erase much of the difference
Given removable storage and finite data volumes on mobile plans, cloud storage is a niche requirement.
No it isn't. Being able to take your media with your where there's no fucking Internet is fucking point, fuckwit.
Pointless.
And i'm also guessing... very expensive.
Oh goodie. Will Linux still use all RAM and go to swap and grind to a halt if I copy a 50GB file to this thing?
Just wondering, why do i need to move that movie in 10 sec if it takes me two hours to watch anyways?
The way I (and I suspect many) people use SD and especially micro SD cards is kinda fire and forget. In other words, there's some device that needs one, so I decide what size I want and shove it in there. Mostly it remains there for the life of the device.
In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it. I see people complain about this in regards to certain smartphones (looking at you Apple) but I think Apple and you are correct that in 99% of the cases the removable storage adds complexity and cost for a feature that never gets used. Most of my staff at work has Android phones of one type or another and I can say confidently that none of them ever remove their removable storage cards even when they've bothered to install one.
The only piece of removable storage I use with any regularity is the SD card in my good camera. SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me. Occasionally I use a USB memory stick and similarly USB isn't going anywhere. I just don't see the point of this thing.
So again what is the point of developing yet another removable card hardware standard without making it compatible with what we already have? I'm excited about stuff like USB-C because it eliminates complexity (or will in due time). I want some really well designed standards that last a long time and that work gracefully with older hardware. I have zero use for an incompatible standards cash grab that doesn't work with any hardware I own or am likely to buy.
As he said, a niche requirement. In the overall market for phones, no one does that.
Cloud storage provides backup, not a niche at all. WiFi is commonly available.
More like Google realized how awful their removable storage worked and fixed it, leading manufacturers to consider adding it back.
A quick back of an envelope calculation suggests that something in the order of 100 million people use underground railways in big cities every year. Until those underground railways have universal wifi coverage, that's a lot of people wanting to listen to music when they're out of range of the internet.
Why can't we just use a universal, standard unit like X so we know how many times faster than a CD it is?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Except for those vendors who try to release a more geeky friendly device. With removable parts rarely seem to make any sucess. Unlike the Desktop PC of old were you paid an average of $2,000 for a system, that you will want to upgrade over time. We are now spending $300 - $600 for a cheaper device that we normally keep for just as long.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What about the Galaxy Note phones
I have an old Note 3 - and I am not going to replace it with something that doesn't have microSD (or equivalent
I want my music on my device, not have to stream it through a VZW pay for data overage plan
Of course if the phone had enough internal storage in the first place... but then it would be too expensive.
Yeah, my phone plan gives me 1 GB/month. That's down from 2 GB/month that my plan originally offered. But that's okay. I don't use a lot of data beyond occasional web browsing. To get 5 GB, I'd have to pay an extra 25 bucks per month. Streaming my music library is out of the question. Or I could take that 25 bucks and get a very large SD card as a one-time purchase. Luckily Samsung realized that this is important to many, many people and brought it back with their latest line. Sorry, but your claims are ridiculous.
WiFi is also commonly unavailable.
Not that it helps you much, but my Note 4 has a microSD slot. I hear the S7 has one too.
What is the latest in the "Note" series anyway? My Note 4 is a great phone (err small tablet) device. Lots of RAM and CPU power to get me though another couple of years, but it might be worth an upgrade...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm sure the device manufacturers would also love not to have to pay Microsoft royalties for exFAT. I was nearly excited and thought they might've (finally) switched to UFS as file system as well.
For what it's worth, I don't think many people care about having a swappable battery so they can swap it out in the middle of the day. A swappable battery is good for those of us who don't want to throw away our otherwise perfectly functional 800 dollar pocket computer when the battery dies in two years.
at some point people will look at the 1 256GB, 2 128GB, 3 64GB, 5 32GB, 12 16GB, 7 8GB, 3 4GB and 4 1GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.
I come here for the love
1000% agree.
You have to be a complete idiot to trust cloud storage with your personal information. In the words of Mr. Facebook... "Dumb Fucks!"
It seems that UFS at least gets rid of that useless DRM in SD cards.
SD means "secure digital" with "secure" meaning DRM. And not only it is an unwanted feature for most users but it also wastes a significant amount of space (10% according to Wikipedia).
It could replace this or that, or you know, it might not.
The vendor HOPES it replaces it. We'll just ignore the existing devices that support only microSD.
There may be different attitudes in different markets, but around here I'm the guy whom the technically inept call when their phones act up, so I see how the "normal" people use their phones. Local storage shortage is one of the more common complaints. They're all wary of cloud storage. Half of them don't use their devices on Wifi at all, and none have mobile plans that are compatible with pervasive use of online storage or streaming. Adding a 32GB or 64GB micro SD card and instructing the camera app to use that instead of internal storage usually solves their problems.
Jeeze, put that knife away. And easy on popping speed.
Too bad they still have no removable battery and a locked bootloader. Looks like nice phones, but now that most carriers require the customer to purchase the phone outright they have no right to lock them down, so I'll pass.
You forget that ISPs are also moving to data caps. Nobody wants to waste their data allowance on backing up their phone to the cloud when they can just buy local storage for far less than the overages. Plus, trusting your data to someone else will always eventually result in a problem. Always.
The boy who cried 'Niche!'
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
And most underground railways now have wifi.
So your point is moot.
And how will you get at your data when the network goes down, Mr. Anderson?
Sneakernet is the last backup you always count on. Unless you enjoy living dangerously.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?
How likely is that? You have been backing up your data right? If you run out of space on most devices (smartphones, etc) it's not that hard to offload some of the data to elsewhere. You're basing your thesis on a bunch of unlikely hypotheticals that are easily mitigated in other ways. I got worked up about Apple eliminating removable storage until I realized that I never once had ever removed it on any phone I had ever owned. I looked around and almost nobody else did either. So I got over it. All it was doing was adding cost and complexity without providing a real world benefit to all but a tiny handful of people. Don't get me wrong, I get that removable storage can be hugely useful for the right person in the right circumstance. But I remain unconvinced that many of the devices that have it really need it given the use cases they are applied to.
What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?
Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly? Are we still solving hypothetical problems that rarely occur in the real world?
You're reall digging your heels in about this. Do you work for Apple, or sell cloud storage or cellular data plans?
+1
Phones are used most often when travelling (citation needed). You might have WiFi at the start and destination and any changes, but on the transport itself it's unlikely. Even when you have it on a train it's very poor because it's just a shared mobile connection that gets interrupted by frequent handovers and tunnels.
Its also reasonable though to understand that phone companies don't see "people who buy a phone and keep it for five years," as a market that they should optimize for at the expense of the "people who buy phones ever 12-24 months" crowd.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
. . . pick another abbreviation for your product.
do you know the knights who say niche?
But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).
First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?
In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards. There is no reason this thing couldn't share the same form factor and work (slowly) in slots for SD cards. They made it incompatible for no reason that benefits customers. Honestly from what I can see so far I hope it dies off quickly.
Mod parent up. I don't get why this is modded as "Troll".
I was indeed astonished to see that the S6 Edge+ didn't have an SD card slot, given the size of the phone, the awesome quality of the camera (you don't want to store everything on Google reduced-quality cloud) and ... the price !
I don't get what Samsung wants to do here. We don't care that much about speed, we want capacity (that increases over the years so we can upgrade our phone), and phones with SD card slots.
No, it's still correct. Cloud storage is a disaster waiting to happen on numerous fronts. Just because the "masses" don't realize it doesn't make it less true.
Sony likes this.
In my opinion, what has made it SD cards niche is Android's crappy storage model which makes using your external card more complicated than it ought to be.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Try taking 10+ pics/second in 4k on an SD. For 20 seconds. No SD can keep up with top end *current* cameras. The SD cards are THE limiting factor for what they can do right now.
I can do 4K video at 30fps on my Sony A6300 camera on an SD UHS III card. Works fine. You might want to actually check your facts. And my camera is no where near the most capable one out there.
Plus there are MANY of us who live in a non-served area. I can only get cell service at my house (where I have a cell booster) but the rest of my property has no service.
So if I want to listen to music while working on the ranch, I have to have it stored ON my phone, not in the damn cloud.
You say this because you don't do anything important. You don't deal with information that can never be trusted to a third party (e.g. cloud). You don't travel for work. You don't work in areas without Wifi since you probably only go from your fiberoptic wired home to your fiberoptic wired cubicle farm. You also undoubtedly have no concern about governments going out of control and spying on you while wiping their ass with the Constitution. I'm sure that you probably know all about Star Wars and dress up like them too. At some point you have to grow up, be a responsible citizen, and see that your viewpoint is very limited. You really need to expand your knowledge of the world.
Yep. He says this like a perfectly normal person.
You, on the other hand, not so much.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.
So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.
You sir are the niche! Most normal, non-technical people I know will not buy a phone without external storage, unless it is an iPhone. They want lots of storage for all their pictures and video. They often ask me how to turn off cloud storage because they don't trust it. If it goes in the cloud, it is because they choose to post it to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, or Pintress. They do not download to their computer and only delete the pictures and video they don't like. Mind you, most of these people also don't know how to set their phones to save pictures and video to external storage, so unless the phone asked them where to store them they get put on the internal memory until it runs out and they ask me how can their big card run out of space so fast.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
UNINTERRUPTED MUSIC.
Packet loss during handoff is a total enjoyment killer for audio.
Additional storage or GTFO. I also want INSTANT access to my music, which a wifi connection will not do.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
For the unaware, SDHC maxes out at 32GB. You then have the option of using SDXC which maxes out at 2TB but there is a problem, SDXC specification mandates the use of exFAT which [surprise!] is restricted by patent by Microsoft. What this means is that memory controller may be optimised for exFAT I/O modes which may result in undefined behavior or brick it if you decide "i'll just format this to EXT4". UFS on the other hand, does not specify even needing a filesystem, so it's more like a SSD than a memory card.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Lets look at your 800 dollar "pocket computer", in terms of economic value, rather than dollars spent.
800 / 24 = $33.34 / month in value amortized across two years .
Let me ask you, do you get $33.34 in value for your phone, each and every month? My guess, is that you do. Do you use every last feature on your phone, every month? Probably not, but that is almost irrelevant. So, you extend your life of your phone, perhaps a year, maybe by adding a replaceable battery.
815 / 36 = $22.64 /month. So, you "save" $11 month (not really).
Instead of buying a "top of the line" (Samsung/Apple) cell phone, packed with features you you don't always use, you can go for a more middle of the road model like the top of the line Nexus (and avoid the bloat and crap installed by your carrier) for the same "$22.64/mo" you're getting out of the top of the line model, and extra battery, replacing your phone every other year instead of every three years, getting better technology more often than trying to extend your expensive eye candy purchase an extra year.
This doesn't even include options for even cheaper phones, more often.
So, in summary, you can buy a "Name Brand Signature Model Cell Phone" every three years, or get a less expensive phone, with all the things you're likely to actually use every two years, for the exact same money. And trust me, when I say this, in three years, your three year old phone is REALLY old, and tired. and in two years, a cheaper phone is going to out perform your now aging phone that you're still going to have to hold onto another year simply to break even.
So, while you THINK you're doing yourself a favor and saving money, you're likely not doing any such thing, and in the end, in two years, you're gonna want to buy that flashy shiney (since you've already proven that is what you're really doing, buying top of the line model ) and buy a new phone anyway. It is better to not lie to yourself, admit you're being foolish and get a better phone every two years, than it is to hold onto a old tired phone every three.
Lastly, when you drop and break your "expensive phone", or lose it on the taxi ride, or have it stolen out of your purse(man bag) at the club, you'll feel much better if it was not quite as costly to replace.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Don't you mean "Knights who say NI" ?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
All the new spec does is improve the damn speed but if it had specified a new form factor such as PicoSD and used RFID to transfer data, then it would be worth something. Otherwise, as stated, all that's happened is they've boosted the speed but to me, is it backwards compatible with my phone/tablet/what-ever using micro-sd cards?
I personally don't give a rat's ass what my phone costs me per month. I care whether or not I'll be forced to buy a whole new one just because a 10 dollar part stopped working. Your entire argument basically comes down to "Just buy cheap garbage at Walmart and replace it when it breaks or becomes unusable." Or you can buy something good in the first place and use it forever. Yeah, my phone takes a quarter of a second to open a webpage instead of an eighth of a second. Guess I'd better throw it away!
Everything about the S6 was a mistake. It lacked dust/water proofing. It lacked a removable battery. It lacked removable storage. The S7 is basically everything the S6 should have been (still missing the removable battery, but I can live without it). I actually bought the S5 over the S6 for that reason.
Avoid.
I own the data on my SD card. I can over write the data on my SD card a few dozen times to make it harder to find. People can't hack into my SD card when it isn't in my phone and steal my data.
Cloud storage is overrated, and way too openly trusted. I'd sooner set up a cloud solution using my home PC. Why don't we have that ability yet?
A friend has got his first smarphone, don't remember if it's running Android 5.1 or 5.0.1.
I think he doesn't care about storage - it's a 5" wifi tablet with a decent camera. No SIM card, no Google account, no apps, so whatever internal storage will be enough (some gigs of photos for what he needs to do) although there's no big reason to not have an SD slot.
He told me the lack of removable battery would be unacceptable.
That is after 15 years of dumb phones, it's expected to remove the back cover and get at the battery, that's all. He knows that the smartphone has very high specs too (1GB RAM and quad core, and whatever high res the display has. $100-$150 price range) so there's no fucking reason to consider it a throw-away.
If a dumbphone lasts a half decade to a decade (if/when you got around to quit losing it every so often), why not this one?
Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.
Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.
It's not proprietary, but run by JEDEC, if that's what you're getting at:
The proposed specification is supported by leading firms in the consumer electronics industry such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix.[4] UFS is positioned as a replacement for eMMCs and SD cards.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage
SD has been around for many years, but with SDXC / UHS-II, it's basically runs its course and getting more and more difficult to move forward.
Yes, it sucks that you'll have to replace things, but it will be over time and gradual. It's not like there's a flag day when all old stuff stops working.
I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?
SD cards have been around since 2000 (16 years now):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Association
I think that's a pretty good run. And it's not like they're completely going away, but UFS is the way forward, and it's nice that there's a transition period.
I think he screwed up. 4K is actually a really shit resolution - it's onlly 8MP. What he meant to say was: try taking a 22MP file (around 5-6MB JPEG or 25-30MB RAW) at 10 fps for 20 seconds.
Same Sony A6300 camera can take 24megapixel jpegs ( 6000x4000 - about 25MB in size each) at a rate of 8-11fps. I haven't tried doing it for 20 seconds straight but it certainly can do it for a while because I've done it. It is limited by buffer size but in practice it hasn't been a problem yet. It also can capture 4K video at 100Mbps. And again there are some far more capable cameras out there. Mine is just a decent little enthusiast camera and not even particularly expensive.
The consumerism is strong in this one. I for one have never owned an $800 phone and will never own an $800 phone, barring hyperinflation. The reason why phones didn't have two SIM slots and an SD card slot until recently was that phones were "sold" by the network operators, who have an inherent desire to make you dependent on their services. In Europe, where phones are increasingly sold without a contract, the trend is to get at least a dual-SIM device, and if the second SIM slot isn't blocked by the obligatory micro SD card slot, that's a plus.
Yeah, that was my whole argument.
The computer I have is from 1995, it still works great! (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (What you can do is irrelevant)
The 10MB Hub I have is great, it still works (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (network speed is irrelevant)
The 35 year old Fridge is great, it still works (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (more efficiency is irrelevant)
There are lots of reasons to upgrade a phone, and the biggest one is ... security updates to the OS. if you want to use Android 4.4 or a version of iOS that is no longer supported, great, use your phone forever!
Strawman arguments are so valid.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Besides the technical issues with exFAT, implementing it also comes with with the requirement of paying Microsoft royalties. That has done a lot of damage to the SDXC format by inflating the price of all SD cards larger than 32GB and encouraging many devices to stick to only supporting SDHC even though the SDXC spec is now more than 7 years old.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
NO NO NO, JUST NO. PLEASE DON'T CALL IT THAT. We already have UFS as "Unix File System" for a storage technology. At least when other acronyms are reused, they're at least slightly different technology. Now the same acronym is used for both the physical and logical layers of storage, just a generation or two apart? NO!
I usually upgrade phones for more storage. I am still waiting for modern mobile devices to catch up to my ancient Archos.
Mobile networks are slow, insecure, unreliable, and expensive. They're like the guy bragging about a 35 year old fridge.
Plus phones are also cameras these days. You want ample room for the new photos and videos you're going to create.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> In my opinion, what has made it SD cards niche is Android's crappy storage model which makes using your external card more complicated than it ought to be.
Total bullshit.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> We are now spending $300 - $600 for a cheaper device that we normally keep for just as long.
And it's still just as upgradeable unless you go out of your way to find something that isn't. The modular devices still remain cheaper because the more compact ones are inherently more expensive. "Smaller" is harder and modular has been the industrial standard for over 150 years.
Typically, you have to go out of your way to gimp something.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> As he said, a niche requirement. In the overall market for phones, no one does that.
It's funny how the conspicuous consumers cling to this idea of ubitquitous mobile networks. You would think with all of that money to waste that they would often find themselves off the beaten path where the network isn't working that well.
That's why I dig local storage.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They sell more outside the US than in. The US market is perverted with great cellular coverage at high prices. The rest of the world has more metered data. People still use sneakernet a lot. Also, you don't have kids. Load 3-5 favorite movies on a mobile device, and have it around for trips and long waits. There's no reason to even have a cellular plan if you have WiFi at home and sufficient on-board storage.
Your narrow world view is the exception, not the norm. Even if 90% of your tiny circle of friends think the same as you.
Learn to love Alaska
Cloud storage is overrated, and way too openly trusted. I'd sooner set up a cloud solution using my home PC. Why don't we have that ability yet?
BTSync
I was indeed astonished to see that the S6 Edge+ didn't have an SD card slot, given the size of the phone, the awesome quality of the camera (you don't want to store everything on Google reduced-quality cloud) and ... the price !
Then you are dumb. It wasn't about features or users. It was about Kies. No SD forces you to use Kies daily. Samsung realized nobody was using their shitty store or apps. So they tried a move to force everyone to use it. They realized they don't have the pull in the market they hoped for.
TouchWiz sucks, and makes things worse for the user, not better. But to force to use their apps, they removed features to leave their apps as the only way to do things. It backfired, and they are now a "market leader" only when it comes to price.
You don't need to store at low res in Google if you store on your PC and sync daily with Kies Samsung was pushing their own failed apps over Google's successful ones. Samsung is dumb. Rather than riding Google's success, they attacked Google while using Google. The confusing stance caused a massive loss in market share. Did I mention TouchWiz sucks.
Learn to love Alaska
..Cloud storage coupled with WiFi access has made external storage on phones obsolete. It is a niche. That's why so many people don't bother with SD cards and normal people don't care whether their device supports SD card or not.
Sorry, but I spend an inordinate amount of time at locations where
a. there aint no feckin' phone service
b. there aint no feckin' wifi
I seriously care if my devices have SD slots, I keep all sorts of useful shit on them, datasheets, reference books, maps and nautical charts, oh, and lots of music..mind you, 'normal people' is not an epithet that has ever been used to describe me (and thank FSM for that..)
Same thing with swappable batteries. Most normal people don't care.
Right up to the minute the things die horribly on them, then they have to pay people like me to replace them..that's when they start caring..
..Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that the needs of a handful of power users (or tinfoil hatters) is indicative of the needs of the masses.
I'm probably in your power tinfoil hat wearing user class, most of my work colleagues (those with Android phones, that is) all have large (128GB) microSD cards in them (usually loaded with music and movies), and these people are most decidedly 'normal'.
And, for backup(as well as ease of access across multiple devices) it is a fairly compelling offering; particularly for people who lack the skill, resources, or interest to handle administering a file server and supporting infrastructure themselves.
That, though, doesn't replace having a bunch of local storage for caching and offline use; it complements it. Even if cost is no object network latency makes grabbing something from a remote host slightly slower than pulling it from a local cache(unless your storage system is truly atrocious); locally cached data also allow you to make any intermittent connectivity losses(fairly common on wireless networks) invisible to the user; and allow you to do things(like video recording or taking a bunch of photos in quick succession) that produce markedly more data than you can safely assume your network connection can handle for a short period of time.
The 'cloud' certainly needs some improvements in terms of security and privacy; but being able to back up the contents of a client device that may be lost, stolen, broken, etc. and make them available to you on other devices is a pretty compelling set of features. It's just a quite different set of features from what a nice chunk of local storage offers: local storage isn't a backup, isn't conveniently accessible from other devices; but costs nothing to read/write to no matter where you are, is usually capable of higher speeds than your network interface is(unless it is egregiously lousy or you have a really, really, classy network; but cellphones aren't usually connected by 10GbE iSCSI HBAs or anything).
The point isn't that "I want an SD card because I'm a luddite who hates all networked filesystems or network file transfer mechanisms"; but "cache crops up in all sorts of areas of computer design where a bit of storage allows you to compensate for the deficiencies, in bandwidth, latency, reliability, or all of the above, of a bus; and given how little an adequate-but-not-thrilling SD card costs; having a generous chunk of cache to improve the apparent performance of a device that relies largely on wireless connections is an obvious win.
There's also the matter of which vendors have enough market power to push designs that enhance their bottom line; vs. vendors who pretty much have to throw in anything the customer might want because they are nearly interchangeable.
Omitting microSD is very attractive to handset vendors because the premium they charge for moving between storage 'tiers' tends to be exceedingly profitable. With Apple's current lineup, 16GB to 64GB or 64GB to 128GB are $100 bumps. I don't doubt that Apple is using nicer NAND than the people slapping together atrocious unbranded fleabay tablets or impulse-buy USB sticks; but that cost/GB($1.56/GB or $2.08/GB) is roughly what you'd see in an 'enterprise' PCIe NVME SSD(something like an Intel P3700) ; with consumer/enthusiast cost/GB more in the $.50/GB range from respectable brands. And that includes the price of the controller and packaging. If you have market power(as Apple does, since if you want an iDevice they are the only option; and as some Android vendors do to lesser degrees, thanks to having the must-have flagship of the moment, or strong brand awareness, or a telco deal or the like); margins like that make cutting the microSD slot very, very tempting; not because it's expensive to implement; but because offering it will eat into sales of your higher margin models.
If you are basically interchangeable with your multiple competitors, it's a much more sensible thing to include: microSD connectors are under a dollar in quantity one; substantially cheaper in volume, basically all common ARM SoCs have at least one SD or SDIO controller available; and the pin count and frequency aren't that heroic so it's not a terribly ugly thing to route from the SoC to the connector.
We had several Samsung batteries fail in our Galaxy S5s, which are not yet 2 years old. Thanks to removable batteries, I was able to fix two phones with the problem (and have a wall-charger and extra battery) for only $22 total.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Or they just don't put SD card slots on so they can rake in extra margin on high capacity versions.
16GB iPhone is $100 cheaper than 64GB version. That's $100 for 48GB of flash space. If the iPhone had a SD slot, you could by a 16GB version and a 64GB SD card for $80 less than the 64GB version, and you'll have 80GB of space.
I read pretty quickly, but I have to say, I'm excited that this card will make me read much faster. 5 GB in 10 seconds is a lot - I'll get so much more reading done!
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Ahh a comment by someone who's never used the WiFi service of an underground railway before.
Right... because there is ALWAYS a WiFi hotspot every place I take pictures and video... NOT!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Seriously? so these cards only go upto 250GB, meanwhile SDXC goes upto 2TB and currently has 200GB cards on the market?? GG with that.
A UFS device is just a flash drive device so it will be possible to use any file system, but I'm wondering what the de-facto standard will be. If I buy a camera with a UFS slot, what file system(s) will the camera be able to use? If I buy a UFS card, what will it be pre-formatted to?
History suggests that they are most likely to license NTFS from Microsoft, since Windows is so hostile to open file systems. But I can dream and hope that they will standardize on something open, and just provide some sort of drivers or custom app for accessing the cards on Windows.
How about Samsung's own F2FS? (Already contributed to Linux!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's (mostly) a lot better in v6 then it was in v5 where the SD card was 99% useless. At least with Android 6, I can "adopt" the card in my phone and have it treated like internal storage (fully encrypted).
Not sure what they're planning in v7 for removable storage, hopefully improvements.
On the contrary, for people who just want a lightweight Facebook-machine, the Macbook is a boon.
You may not be in the market for one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for one.
If you want a Macbook Pro, get a Macbook Pro.
WiFi is also commonly unavailable.
But caps are commonly available.
It's (mostly) a lot better in v6 then it was in v5 where the SD card was 99% useless. At least with Android 6, I can "adopt" the card in my phone and have it treated like internal storage (fully encrypted).
Not sure what they're planning in v7 for removable storage, hopefully improvements.
v6?, v5?, v7?....I know naught of such modern magery!
My phone is running Android 2.3.6, has no problems using the SD card for music and offline map storage/access (currently 64GB, will be 128GB by next weekend as I need the extra space mainly for more offline map storage and future data logging)
My ebook reader is running Android 2.1, gets used extensively every week day, not so much at weekends, and has been accessing the same rather full 32GB SD card for the past three years with no problems, again this card is to be permanently replaced with a 128GB card by next weekend as I've another 39GB of documents of one sort or another to copy over to it that I *might* be needing to refer to over the next 6-7 months when I'll be mostly offline.
(some of us like running hardware into the ground, both the above devices have survived some rather extreme conditions which have 'done for' their more modern and (as proven in the field) somewhat lesser brethren, I'll be rather sad the day I'll eventually have to replace either of them, especially the ebook reader)
Cool thanks!
Back in the days before phones had standardized charging jacks and battery packs that could be used to charge a phone, swappable batteries were important for extending the amount of time you could use a phone. But every modern phone has either MicroUSB, USB-C, or one of Apple's charging jacks and can be connected to a 5V power pack to charge.
Swappable batteries are still handy when your phone's battery wears out. Some phones with internal batteries make it easy to replace that battery; others, not so much.
Why should they care? So long as you keep paying the monthly fee they should be happy.
Their primary business is selling connectivity services, not phones. Back when they were still offering subsidies on phones they were LOSING money when they sold you a new phone. Sometimes they still offer deals where they sell you a phone (or multiple phones) at a loss if you are willing to commit to using their services for a while.
From their point of view, the main benefit of selling you a new phone is that you're likely to consume more data with the newer and faster device.
It may not quite match your Archos, but my 64GB ZenFone 2 plus a 128GB MicroSD card isn't shabby. (The 200GB MicroSD cards from SanDisk are too rich for my blood.) If I had waited a few more months I could have bought the 128GB version of the phone and had 256GB total.
Heck, why not 128GB if the phone will accept it? They're only $30 now. Older phones may be limited to 32GB because they don't have SDXC support.
it seems like it could be used as a swappable ssd replacement for an OS - which is actually really cool
Why are you pretending that one can't just spend $79 for a battery replacement ? Cheaper phones mean dicking with Android. I have better things to do with my time.
Wow, you have truly taken planned obsolescence in and made it part of your very identity. You are what is wrong in the world.