Excuse me: why smartphones deprive memory card support
Hi% username%! You can magnify your mobile phone as a “smart phone” or “pocket computer”, but the computer modularity in gadgets does not smell like that, and customers are often in response to criticism offered a great solution to the problem - not to buy a device. And even the upgrade of the drive, a rare exception in the "one-time" design of tablets and smartphones, manufacturers are trying to abolish. It's time to figure out why memory cards got to the phone in a roundabout way, which didn’t please electronics manufacturers, and how you can stop depending on the memory capacity in gadgets today. I ask for kat for scandals, intrigues, investigations, details. 
It is now memory cards are more common in phones than in cameras and, a little more than in all other digital technology. However, removable drives still lead from desktop PCs to their history. In the good old days, everyone yearned for a reliable and easy-to-use alternative to the hard drives, CDs, and floppy disks that were common at that time. But it was only at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when manufacturers merged, developed the PC Card standard ( PCMCIA , if you like to break the language about exact terms), to translate aspirations into reality, and 6 years later - now revered by Compact Flash photographers.
I propose to delve into the wilds of formats and their distinctive features in the appropriate post , and the point is that the popularity of credit card-sized drives was in fact fleeting: instead of extensive slots in laptops and desktops, the world domination got hold of the USB interface, and they began to use everyday USB flash drives. They have successfully killed the floppy disks, and the compact discs to boot, and they have been spreading overwhelming circulations to this day.
')
USB flash drives have taken the place of bulky PC Cards as everyday portable drives
But manufacturers, in the best traditions of the "Queen of the gas station", did not change the dream, and this very dream was changed - from compact desktop satellites such drives turned into standard data storages for all types of compact electronics.
"Rehearsal" initially unfolded in audio players. The CD, as a carrier of information, had already celebrated its 15th anniversary at that time, so the idea of recording music for something more modern and compact was widely welcomed. The idea to install an MP3 player in a flash drive, and not to endow this player with “flash drives”, also came to life ( YO DAWG !), But at the initial stage it was the players with memory card that took over. The commercially successful firstborn of this concept, the Rio PMP300, even tried to ban the infamous RIAA. And memory cards stepped over a 32-megabyte line and acquired a more or less modern look - the era of memory cards in phones began simultaneously with the advent of the first MMC (MultiMediaCard) cards and its modified version, (SD) Secure Digital.
Between players with built-in flash drives and flash drives with built-in players, the first became the most popular.
It is therefore quite natural that expandable memory has arrived on mainstream phones along with the functionality of an MP3 player. And the pioneer in the multimedia class was the much-loved Siemens SL45 . By the standards of the 2001 model year, it looked even more impressive than the current smartphones flagships with records in the benchmarks. Slow COM-port for file transfer and ridiculous 32 MB of capacity on a removable drive did not stop anyone - SL45 was very popular, and memory cards from those went to surf the models of premium class, and then more affordable phones.
Siemens SL45 - the first phone with expandable memory and MP3 support
If you do not take into account the individual "excesses on the ground", like CF-cards in communicators of the beginning of the XXI century, the drives in gadgets quickly took the path of miniaturization. Without going into the exciting confrontation of “Sony (Memory Stick) against all (SD)”, we note that, following the compact RS-MMC and the “transitional” miniSD Transfash memory card (the maiden name microSD), they began to be installed in gadgets since 2005 and disturbed the mind enthusiasts for their miniature. To outdo the “neighbor” with the compactness of the Nano-SIM card, by the way, could only 7 years later.
Apple is considered to be the most famous “rejector” of memory cards on mobile phones, although the phone manufacturers experienced experimental models without the support of removable storage devices long before the announcement of the Cupertino smartphone. Take at least the same Nokia N91, which in 2006 had a built-in hard disk of 4 or 8 GB without the possibility of expansion. After a couple of years, something similar (only with flash memory instead of HDD) was reproduced by Sony Ericsson in its flagship clamshell W980i.
Non-iPhone phones live without memory card slots
However, only Apple has the idea of abolishing removable parts in a smartphone looks like a consistent solution. Starting with full control of prices for certain iPhone bundles and continuing with the refusal of removable SIM-cards in new gadgets. Such plans may alarm paranoids, but the Cupertinians have always been famous for eliminating problems at the expense of "turnkey" technology, albeit with some degree of lack of freedom in return for a long and tedious struggle with similar problems from competitors.
The funnier is the reality in the camp of android phones, where the “top management” does not like microSD (the Google Nexus pedigree is proof of that), while manufacturers rarely release models without the possibility of expanding memory. Because "public opinion" dictates its own conditions: the situation with the Galaxy S6 / S7 clearly confirms this.
With the release of the sixth generation of their flagship Samsung, they didn’t argue against the microSD. Say, and the case became thinner for this reason, and the internal storage of UFS 2.0 was “undesirable to slow down” by working with removable cards, and bundling extended up to 128 GB for the S6 / S6 edge. But customer dissatisfaction has done its job, so in all versions of the Galaxy S7 memory card slot is already present.
Google limits the functionality of memory cards in Android from year to year and turns the recording of content on them into an inconvenient task - partly so that users pay more attention to Google Play streaming services and Google Disk cloud storage, and also because of imaginary security problems. In the opinion of the corporation of good, a good drive is an encrypted drive, this option has not yet become active by default, and the long-awaited merging of a standard drive with a memory card via Adoptable Storage in all new smartphones is done, hum, in an undocumented way, which also does not add optimism.
Hugo Barra believes that smartphones do not need memory cards, because Xiaomi customers constantly purchase fake microSD
And, finally, the arguments of Chinese smartphone makers look discouraging. Vice President Xiaomi, Hugo Barr, for example, accuses microSD of all sins (power consumption, design, speed and stability of the smartphone) and claims that memory cards are not the place for flagships either because buyers are buying fake drives and then blaming Xiaomi company in the unstable operation of smartphones. With a similar argument, it would be very convenient to ban kitchen knives and meat grinders around the world.
Charges and revelations are amusing activities, but they do not solve the problem by themselves. As we know from classical literature, after the novel “Who is to blame?” Should release the novel “What to do?”, And Kingston has an answer to the last question.
In the life of every desktop computer there comes a time when it becomes easier to download a file from the Internet than to find it on the HDD. Given the young and dynamically developing LTE networks, such a fate will soon befall the gadgets. Only here devices with support for shooting video in 4K and lossless music on board can hardly get out of the cloud storage. Brave geeks are free to try to build a memory card slot into their smartphones, but this procedure will lead to massive casualties (among mobile phones) and is unlikely to suit every reader. So - there is a reason to think about buying an external drive.
Bullets implanted in their Google Nexus memory card slot. To know, not from the good life
Under such tasks, Kingston has several options at once, and these are not bulky and fragile hard drives, but much more elegant solutions. The most obvious and “analog” of them is a USB-OTG flash drive DataTraveler microDuo . Without a ridiculous cable and other half measures, but with full-sized USB 2.0 / 3.0 and Micro-USB / Type-C on a miniature case. This is not the ultimate version of the “I will install all the games now” level, but a simple way to send up to 64 GB of content to an external drive without interfacing with a computer and running around with a “cord” and hard drive at the wrong time. Applications and games, of course, will remain inside the smartphone / tablet, but from the habit of storing the video library on the internal drive you will be able to get rid of, like the dominance of scruffy VHS tapes / DVDs on racks in the apartment.
Kingston DataTraveler microDuo - a simple and unobtrusive way to send an array of files from a smartphone to an external drive
For all those who are physically connected to the flash drive is not enough "Nextgen", Kingston produces wireless drives. More precisely, not only drives, but a card reader with a USB port, an SDXC slot, a network connector, and a capacious battery. Need to send files over the air to the archive? Corporate application to help - and send files at a speed of 802.11ac 5 GHz to the drive. There is nothing to record yet? This same MobileLite Wireless G3 will serve as a PowerBank with a current of 2A or a Wi-Fi access point, if there is Ethernet nearby. At a minimum, a USB-Ethernet adapter for ultrabook and “emergency assistance” in the form of charging for a smartphone such a card reader is able to replace.
Kingston MobileLite Wireless - a wireless external drive, router and PowerBank in one person
There are always workarounds, and with a capacious and fast drive in a smartphone, you can do tricks of almost computer scale. It’s worthwhile to talk separately about what a memory card in new (and not so) android phones besides routine data storage can be useful for, and until% username%, keep up the spirit and buy only good drives!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
"Music has tied us". How memory cards got into the phones
It is now memory cards are more common in phones than in cameras and, a little more than in all other digital technology. However, removable drives still lead from desktop PCs to their history. In the good old days, everyone yearned for a reliable and easy-to-use alternative to the hard drives, CDs, and floppy disks that were common at that time. But it was only at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when manufacturers merged, developed the PC Card standard ( PCMCIA , if you like to break the language about exact terms), to translate aspirations into reality, and 6 years later - now revered by Compact Flash photographers.
I propose to delve into the wilds of formats and their distinctive features in the appropriate post , and the point is that the popularity of credit card-sized drives was in fact fleeting: instead of extensive slots in laptops and desktops, the world domination got hold of the USB interface, and they began to use everyday USB flash drives. They have successfully killed the floppy disks, and the compact discs to boot, and they have been spreading overwhelming circulations to this day.
')
USB flash drives have taken the place of bulky PC Cards as everyday portable drives
But manufacturers, in the best traditions of the "Queen of the gas station", did not change the dream, and this very dream was changed - from compact desktop satellites such drives turned into standard data storages for all types of compact electronics.
"Rehearsal" initially unfolded in audio players. The CD, as a carrier of information, had already celebrated its 15th anniversary at that time, so the idea of recording music for something more modern and compact was widely welcomed. The idea to install an MP3 player in a flash drive, and not to endow this player with “flash drives”, also came to life ( YO DAWG !), But at the initial stage it was the players with memory card that took over. The commercially successful firstborn of this concept, the Rio PMP300, even tried to ban the infamous RIAA. And memory cards stepped over a 32-megabyte line and acquired a more or less modern look - the era of memory cards in phones began simultaneously with the advent of the first MMC (MultiMediaCard) cards and its modified version, (SD) Secure Digital.
Between players with built-in flash drives and flash drives with built-in players, the first became the most popular.
It is therefore quite natural that expandable memory has arrived on mainstream phones along with the functionality of an MP3 player. And the pioneer in the multimedia class was the much-loved Siemens SL45 . By the standards of the 2001 model year, it looked even more impressive than the current smartphones flagships with records in the benchmarks. Slow COM-port for file transfer and ridiculous 32 MB of capacity on a removable drive did not stop anyone - SL45 was very popular, and memory cards from those went to surf the models of premium class, and then more affordable phones.
Siemens SL45 - the first phone with expandable memory and MP3 support
If you do not take into account the individual "excesses on the ground", like CF-cards in communicators of the beginning of the XXI century, the drives in gadgets quickly took the path of miniaturization. Without going into the exciting confrontation of “Sony (Memory Stick) against all (SD)”, we note that, following the compact RS-MMC and the “transitional” miniSD Transfash memory card (the maiden name microSD), they began to be installed in gadgets since 2005 and disturbed the mind enthusiasts for their miniature. To outdo the “neighbor” with the compactness of the Nano-SIM card, by the way, could only 7 years later.
What is wrong the good old microSD?
Apple is considered to be the most famous “rejector” of memory cards on mobile phones, although the phone manufacturers experienced experimental models without the support of removable storage devices long before the announcement of the Cupertino smartphone. Take at least the same Nokia N91, which in 2006 had a built-in hard disk of 4 or 8 GB without the possibility of expansion. After a couple of years, something similar (only with flash memory instead of HDD) was reproduced by Sony Ericsson in its flagship clamshell W980i.
Non-iPhone phones live without memory card slots
However, only Apple has the idea of abolishing removable parts in a smartphone looks like a consistent solution. Starting with full control of prices for certain iPhone bundles and continuing with the refusal of removable SIM-cards in new gadgets. Such plans may alarm paranoids, but the Cupertinians have always been famous for eliminating problems at the expense of "turnkey" technology, albeit with some degree of lack of freedom in return for a long and tedious struggle with similar problems from competitors.
The funnier is the reality in the camp of android phones, where the “top management” does not like microSD (the Google Nexus pedigree is proof of that), while manufacturers rarely release models without the possibility of expanding memory. Because "public opinion" dictates its own conditions: the situation with the Galaxy S6 / S7 clearly confirms this.
With the release of the sixth generation of their flagship Samsung, they didn’t argue against the microSD. Say, and the case became thinner for this reason, and the internal storage of UFS 2.0 was “undesirable to slow down” by working with removable cards, and bundling extended up to 128 GB for the S6 / S6 edge. But customer dissatisfaction has done its job, so in all versions of the Galaxy S7 memory card slot is already present.
Google limits the functionality of memory cards in Android from year to year and turns the recording of content on them into an inconvenient task - partly so that users pay more attention to Google Play streaming services and Google Disk cloud storage, and also because of imaginary security problems. In the opinion of the corporation of good, a good drive is an encrypted drive, this option has not yet become active by default, and the long-awaited merging of a standard drive with a memory card via Adoptable Storage in all new smartphones is done, hum, in an undocumented way, which also does not add optimism.
Hugo Barra believes that smartphones do not need memory cards, because Xiaomi customers constantly purchase fake microSD
And, finally, the arguments of Chinese smartphone makers look discouraging. Vice President Xiaomi, Hugo Barr, for example, accuses microSD of all sins (power consumption, design, speed and stability of the smartphone) and claims that memory cards are not the place for flagships either because buyers are buying fake drives and then blaming Xiaomi company in the unstable operation of smartphones. With a similar argument, it would be very convenient to ban kitchen knives and meat grinders around the world.
For every clever marketing strategy there is a “flash drive” with convenient connectors and access to files.
Charges and revelations are amusing activities, but they do not solve the problem by themselves. As we know from classical literature, after the novel “Who is to blame?” Should release the novel “What to do?”, And Kingston has an answer to the last question.
In the life of every desktop computer there comes a time when it becomes easier to download a file from the Internet than to find it on the HDD. Given the young and dynamically developing LTE networks, such a fate will soon befall the gadgets. Only here devices with support for shooting video in 4K and lossless music on board can hardly get out of the cloud storage. Brave geeks are free to try to build a memory card slot into their smartphones, but this procedure will lead to massive casualties (among mobile phones) and is unlikely to suit every reader. So - there is a reason to think about buying an external drive.
Bullets implanted in their Google Nexus memory card slot. To know, not from the good life
Under such tasks, Kingston has several options at once, and these are not bulky and fragile hard drives, but much more elegant solutions. The most obvious and “analog” of them is a USB-OTG flash drive DataTraveler microDuo . Without a ridiculous cable and other half measures, but with full-sized USB 2.0 / 3.0 and Micro-USB / Type-C on a miniature case. This is not the ultimate version of the “I will install all the games now” level, but a simple way to send up to 64 GB of content to an external drive without interfacing with a computer and running around with a “cord” and hard drive at the wrong time. Applications and games, of course, will remain inside the smartphone / tablet, but from the habit of storing the video library on the internal drive you will be able to get rid of, like the dominance of scruffy VHS tapes / DVDs on racks in the apartment.
Kingston DataTraveler microDuo - a simple and unobtrusive way to send an array of files from a smartphone to an external drive
For all those who are physically connected to the flash drive is not enough "Nextgen", Kingston produces wireless drives. More precisely, not only drives, but a card reader with a USB port, an SDXC slot, a network connector, and a capacious battery. Need to send files over the air to the archive? Corporate application to help - and send files at a speed of 802.11ac 5 GHz to the drive. There is nothing to record yet? This same MobileLite Wireless G3 will serve as a PowerBank with a current of 2A or a Wi-Fi access point, if there is Ethernet nearby. At a minimum, a USB-Ethernet adapter for ultrabook and “emergency assistance” in the form of charging for a smartphone such a card reader is able to replace.
Kingston MobileLite Wireless - a wireless external drive, router and PowerBank in one person
The memory card in the smartphone is more than just a memory card
There are always workarounds, and with a capacious and fast drive in a smartphone, you can do tricks of almost computer scale. It’s worthwhile to talk separately about what a memory card in new (and not so) android phones besides routine data storage can be useful for, and until% username%, keep up the spirit and buy only good drives!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
Our previous posts:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/392951/
All Articles