The amount of storage in a phone is a pretty hot debate in this industry, especially now that many manufacturers are opting not to include microSD card slots, a form of external storage that was once the primary form of storage in phones. It's interesting to say that given that Apple's iPhone, being the first real smartphone to start the whole smartphone revolution, never opted to employ microSD cards as a form of storage. However, most other platforms have at least in one form or another used microSD at one point or another. Now it seems all platforms are working to push for internal storage, with cloud storage as an alternative method.
However, not all people are interested in using cloud storage as a storage method, as it does seem like kind of a risky method. Storing your stuff on a server that's hosted and ran by somebody else? I don't know about you, but I'm not the type of person that trusts that easily. It's one thing having everything stored on my phone so that if somebody steals it one person has access to it, but stored in place where it could somehow be hacked makes me just a little more worried.
That being said, it seems like the inevitable is happening: microSD cards seem to be becoming a thing of the past. Several flagship Androids no longer use microSD, as well as Windows Phone devices. Although it's still a fairly unreliable method of storing data (those cards fail if you look at them the wrong way sometimes) it is an easy solution for switching data back and forth between different devices (as long as they both use microSD cards).
My first phone that didn't have a microSD card was my iPhone 4S. It was actually one of the reasons I had contemplated not getting the device. I had never had a phone that didn't have a microSD card slot, but I had never seemed to have an issue with running out of storage before then. Since the phone I was using at the time (HTC EVO 3D) only had an 8GB microSD card in it, I figured that 16GB in my iPhone 4S was more than enough to get me by.
Well, that was wrong. It was not enough. In fact, it had run out rather quickly, and there was not a whole lot I could do about it other than erasing things or storing them on my computer. It wasn't really a big deal, just somewhat of an annoyance. It seemed like 16GB was my limit, so when it came time to switch it up to a new phone I was happy that the HTC One started off with 32GB. Once again, the phone didn't come with a microSD card slot, but I figured that if I had double the memory I already had that it would be a non-issue.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Surprise, surprise! It's not enough. And I've only had this phone for one, two... five months now?
I thought about this after reading up more about Meizu, the Chinese manufacturer that plans on entering the U.S. market sometime in 2014. Meizu is the manufacturer that produced the first phone with 128GB of internal storage, so I did start to wonder whether they will have such a large amount of storage available in the phones they produce for here. If they do, though, I am wondering just how long it would take for me to fill that much space up, too. Although I would like to assume that it would take me years to fill up that much space, it seems like that's not exactly the case as I've come to find out. It seems more like I'm the type of person that will use it if it's there. I will find things to fill the space up with.
But in all seriousness, I would hope that I wouldn't fill up 128GB of space within such a short amount of time. But I guess at this point I couldn't be surprised if I did. More companies just need to include microSD card. Is that so much to ask?
Image via Silicon Station
