4 ms·

They did the work for third parties to keep it an an option for the lower end market. The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honest

They did the work for third parties to keep it an an option for the lower end market. The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible. Internal storage is faster and more reliable so I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options.

zanny 11y ago
SD card user experience is terrible, so we will fix the user experience (and just make them a joint overlay FS) but not include one, while still shipping phones with 16-64GB capacities like we did five years ago. If they want me to ever buy an SD card-less phone, they better start shipping 256GB options at the real cost of the flash memory involved (ie, $40 more expensive over a 64GB option, not $100 or more). When you are shipping phones with cameras nearing 20+ MP where you would fill up the paltry internal storage (what, like 10GB after OS on the 16GB models?) in a thousand photos at PNG compression (ie, about 10MB a shot) you are doing it wrong, especially when SSD manufacturers are about to start shipping 4TB options in m.2 form factors (ie, the size of a small candy bar).
danieldk 11y ago
Internal storage is faster and more reliable Still, SD cards are still fine for storing large amounts of photos, videos, and music. And as a proud father of a 1.5 year old, I like to stash a lot of photos/videos on my phone. their user experience has always been terrible. The other obvious reason is that phone manufacturers like to overcharge on extra storage. I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options. Not everyone is moving in that direction. E.g. the new Moto Xs support SD cards, while the previous generations didn't.
rsync 11y ago
"The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible." But that's just an easy software fix away. There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually,
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually, See, you're thinking in terms of UI but I'm talking about user experience (which isn't just UI). It sounds like they essentially fixed the UI type of issues in Android M but SD cards are still slower, once you install it you really don't want to ever remove it or if you do god knows what happens now that the storage is unified and good luck explaining how to use and install one to a non-tech savvy person. After working years in retail I don't believe the majority of customers for digital cameras understood cards let alone _optional_ cards in phones.
  - rsync 11y ago
    Well, if android phones still had the ability to masquerade as a USB drive (in order to move files/photos/whatever) on and off, then I could see leaving the SD card in place forever. But android phones don't currently have the ability to behave as a simple USB drive when you plug them into the computer. So if you're even a little bit discerning, and you refuse to install silly helper apps and photo-importers and android-buddy programs on your computers, you need some other (sane) way to move files on and off the phone - and that is the SD card. They're just files. You don't need a little helper app or to open up iPhoto and "import" or any of this silliness. You just need a dumb block device that you can move back and forth.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      As far as I can tell, the decision to remove Mass Storage had two main drivers: * The removal of SD cards from mainstream phones * The use of ext4 as a main filesystem on a lot of phones. The removal of SD cards meant that you could no longer "unmount" part of the phone filesystem to present it as a mass storage device. The use of ext4 meant that many OSes had no idea how to mount the storage, even if you presented it as a block device. I'm not sure anyone will read this, but I think you could implement a FAT emulation layer over USB Gadget, at least enough to get car head-decks to play MP3s off the phone. If anyone wants to take a crack at this, please get in touch with me.
xlm1717 11y ago
But that's what the commenter was saying, Google has been putting work into making the experience less terrible. Also, Motorola and LG both have flagships with expandable storage. Everyone runs out of 32GB, and having an SD card handy to make more on-device storage available can only improve the user experience.
guelo 11y ago
> The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards Samsung sold a lot more phones when they used to have sd cards.
JohnTHaller 11y ago
The thing is, internal storage isn't necessarily faster. Sure, it is on the top tier $750 and up premium-priced phones like the iPhone 6s (which has very fast internal storage). But we're talking about a much less expensive phone here. Let's compare: 64GB Nexus 6P: $549 64GB iPhone 6S+: $849 So, you really shouldn't expect the Nexus 6P to be using the top-tier internal storage solutions Samsung rolls out as used in the iPhone and Samsung phones. Yes, a lot of that $300 price difference is for the Apple name, especially when you factor in the lower resolution 6S+ 1080p screen. But quite a bit of it is used for the polishing bits that make the phone faster... like much faster storage. As a data point, the high-end Sandisk 64GB microSD cards are about $50 and are around 3x faster than the internal storage in my Nexus 6. They're hitting 95 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write now. While a microSD won't top out at the 200 MB/s you get from last year's top-tier storage available in the Samsung S6 and iPhone 6 (not to mention the twice as fast Samsung storage in the new iPhone 6s and upcoming Samsung phone), they'll perform better than the internal storage in most mid-tier phones and all low-tier phones, which is all most folks need for photos and videos.
- danieldk 11y ago
  and are around 3x faster than the internal storage in my Nexus 6. They're hitting 95 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write now. Even the Moto G has that read speed. More expensive phones are much faster... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review/3 Also, I wonder what SD read/write speeds are in practice.
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    Not quite. A more recent chart comparing them is here: http://anandtech.com/show/9662/iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-preliminary-results http://anandtech.com/show/9662/iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-... Note that everything tested is below the 90 MB/s sequential write speed of a high-end microSD except the iPhone 6s Plus. From a review, here's the numbers on the 64Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro microSD using CrystalDiskMark: Sequential Read : 95.325 MB/s Sequential Write : 90.660 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 89.314 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 75.971 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 7.492 MB/s [ 1829.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.441 MB/s [ 595.9 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 7.472 MB/s [ 1824.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.380 MB/s [ 581.0 IOPS] Note that Ars Technica is using Sequential Read/Write values on 256K which is flawed. It should be larger to be accurate.
voyou 11y ago
"their user experience has always been terrible." What's so terrible about the user experience? I put in an SD card, my phone has more storage space, and I don't think about it any more. Seems like a pretty perfect user experience.
- motoboi 11y ago
  It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. You can't use your SD as extensions of your device storage capacity, it can store just "your" files (as photos, musics, videos etc). You still need device capacity to install apps and apps use device to store things like cache. You can move some of that to SD, but not everything. You'll end up with zero phone capacity and a pretty empty SD.
lern_too_spel 11y ago
My uneducated guess is they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax for FAT.

zanny 11y ago

SD card user experience is terrible, so we will fix the user experience (and just make them a joint overlay FS) but not include one, while still shipping phones with 16-64GB capacities like we did five years ago. If they want me to ever buy an SD card-less phone, they better start shipping 256GB options at the real cost of the flash memory involved (ie, $40 more expensive over a 64GB option, not $100 or more). When you are shipping phones with cameras nearing 20+ MP where you would fill up the paltry internal storage (what, like 10GB after OS on the 16GB models?) in a thousand photos at PNG compression (ie, about 10MB a shot) you are doing it wrong, especially when SSD manufacturers are about to start shipping 4TB options in m.2 form factors (ie, the size of a small candy bar).

danieldk 11y ago

Internal storage is faster and more reliable Still, SD cards are still fine for storing large amounts of photos, videos, and music. And as a proud father of a 1.5 year old, I like to stash a lot of photos/videos on my phone. their user experience has always been terrible. The other obvious reason is that phone manufacturers like to overcharge on extra storage. I think you're always going to see more and more phones, especially flagships, not offer expandable options. Not everyone is moving in that direction. E.g. the new Moto Xs support SD cards, while the previous generations didn't.

rsync 11y ago

"The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards and, honestly, I think for good reason: their user experience has always been terrible." But that's just an easy software fix away. There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually,

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> There is nothing inherent to SD cards (or removable storage in general) that makes it a tough UI case. It's pretty simple, actually, See, you're thinking in terms of UI but I'm talking about user experience (which isn't just UI). It sounds like they essentially fixed the UI type of issues in Android M but SD cards are still slower, once you install it you really don't want to ever remove it or if you do god knows what happens now that the storage is unified and good luck explaining how to use and install one to a non-tech savvy person. After working years in retail I don't believe the majority of customers for digital cameras understood cards let alone _optional_ cards in phones.
- rsync 11y ago
  Well, if android phones still had the ability to masquerade as a USB drive (in order to move files/photos/whatever) on and off, then I could see leaving the SD card in place forever. But android phones don't currently have the ability to behave as a simple USB drive when you plug them into the computer. So if you're even a little bit discerning, and you refuse to install silly helper apps and photo-importers and android-buddy programs on your computers, you need some other (sane) way to move files on and off the phone - and that is the SD card. They're just files. You don't need a little helper app or to open up iPhoto and "import" or any of this silliness. You just need a dumb block device that you can move back and forth.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    As far as I can tell, the decision to remove Mass Storage had two main drivers: * The removal of SD cards from mainstream phones * The use of ext4 as a main filesystem on a lot of phones. The removal of SD cards meant that you could no longer "unmount" part of the phone filesystem to present it as a mass storage device. The use of ext4 meant that many OSes had no idea how to mount the storage, even if you presented it as a block device. I'm not sure anyone will read this, but I think you could implement a FAT emulation layer over USB Gadget, at least enough to get car head-decks to play MP3s off the phone. If anyone wants to take a crack at this, please get in touch with me.

xlm1717 11y ago

But that's what the commenter was saying, Google has been putting work into making the experience less terrible. Also, Motorola and LG both have flagships with expandable storage. Everyone runs out of 32GB, and having an SD card handy to make more on-device storage available can only improve the user experience.

guelo 11y ago

> The higher end market has shown it doesn't care about SD cards Samsung sold a lot more phones when they used to have sd cards.

JohnTHaller 11y ago

The thing is, internal storage isn't necessarily faster. Sure, it is on the top tier $750 and up premium-priced phones like the iPhone 6s (which has very fast internal storage). But we're talking about a much less expensive phone here. Let's compare: 64GB Nexus 6P: $549 64GB iPhone 6S+: $849 So, you really shouldn't expect the Nexus 6P to be using the top-tier internal storage solutions Samsung rolls out as used in the iPhone and Samsung phones. Yes, a lot of that $300 price difference is for the Apple name, especially when you factor in the lower resolution 6S+ 1080p screen. But quite a bit of it is used for the polishing bits that make the phone faster... like much faster storage. As a data point, the high-end Sandisk 64GB microSD cards are about $50 and are around 3x faster than the internal storage in my Nexus 6. They're hitting 95 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write now. While a microSD won't top out at the 200 MB/s you get from last year's top-tier storage available in the Samsung S6 and iPhone 6 (not to mention the twice as fast Samsung storage in the new iPhone 6s and upcoming Samsung phone), they'll perform better than the internal storage in most mid-tier phones and all low-tier phones, which is all most folks need for photos and videos.

danieldk 11y ago
and are around 3x faster than the internal storage in my Nexus 6. They're hitting 95 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write now. Even the Moto G has that read speed. More expensive phones are much faster... http://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review/3 Also, I wonder what SD read/write speeds are in practice.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  Not quite. A more recent chart comparing them is here: http://anandtech.com/show/9662/iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-preliminary-results http://anandtech.com/show/9662/iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-... Note that everything tested is below the 90 MB/s sequential write speed of a high-end microSD except the iPhone 6s Plus. From a review, here's the numbers on the 64Gb Sandisk Extreme Pro microSD using CrystalDiskMark: Sequential Read : 95.325 MB/s Sequential Write : 90.660 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 89.314 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 75.971 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 7.492 MB/s [ 1829.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.441 MB/s [ 595.9 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 7.472 MB/s [ 1824.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.380 MB/s [ 581.0 IOPS] Note that Ars Technica is using Sequential Read/Write values on 256K which is flawed. It should be larger to be accurate.

voyou 11y ago

"their user experience has always been terrible." What's so terrible about the user experience? I put in an SD card, my phone has more storage space, and I don't think about it any more. Seems like a pretty perfect user experience.

motoboi 11y ago
It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. You can't use your SD as extensions of your device storage capacity, it can store just "your" files (as photos, musics, videos etc). You still need device capacity to install apps and apps use device to store things like cache. You can move some of that to SD, but not everything. You'll end up with zero phone capacity and a pretty empty SD.

lern_too_spel 11y ago

My uneducated guess is they don't want to pay the Microsoft tax for FAT.