My last phone was 7 years old and no longer supported. Since the support ended, my banking apps quit working. I decided to buy a new phone. I am a long time android user and I quit apple 15ish years ago. I have pretty much only had Samsung phones since. When shopping for new phones, I noticed that they are mostly dropping the SD expansion card. I really wanted a SD card so I searched and searched and I ended up buying a mid tier Motorola as even the flagship Motorola’s have gone away from the SD cards.
I believe that these phones are ditching the SD cards to push the expansion of cloud storage. If you want to keep the pictures and videos you will get locked into their system for life. This will ensure that you continue to pay to store data that doesn’t really need to be stored. It is much like the storage unit business. If you keep the monthly fee low enough people will spend thousands over time to store hundreds of dollars of goods.
Why do I want the SD card? I use my phone to process and edit videos and they can take up a massive amount of storage. I periodically back these up to my external hard drive and it is a lot easier to do that with a SD card. So far, I like my $300 Motorola phone.
Next I am going to consider swapping service. Currently I am on $45 ATT prepaid plan. I am considering swapping to USmobile. Does anyone use them?
We were a Motorola family until my kids got stuck up (and my wifes work phone) and switched to I-phones. Now I have one.
IMO, the Motorola’s are by far the best bang for your buck phones on the market.
I am on T-Mobile, grandfathered into an old Sprint plan that ATT 's employee plan can’t even beat.
I had a couple Motorola under $250 phones and was happy with them. I’m now using a Pixel 7a which I like a lot, it was the cheapest option at the time. ($2 a month for 36 months with AT&T.)
Have not seen an SD card in a phone in a long time. I would be content to plug it in over USB cable, mount the file system, and copy/move whatever files I wanted. I gave up on android years ago, primarily because “security” updates are tough. Neither the maker (EVIL google) nor any telco provides updates with any regularity. Apple does, no matter how you got your iPhone.
Now Apple is evil too, but I think less so than google. No expansion that I have seen in any model. Then transfering files also sux. They want you to use iTune$ to do it, and doing so over a wire seems near impossible. Work around for me is to use DropBox to upload and get to a computer. I find it tough enough to edit a video file on a computer and would not think of trying to do it on a phone, and I do only the simplest of editing which is chopping off unwanted footage front and back.
Agreed. The market has aged out of this, and insisting on a phone with this feature may limit software/security updates.
There’s a good software app called 3u Tools that has allowed me to transfer files off the iPhone onto the PC. I think it will work on Linux too if you still hate “Windoze.”
I prefer Apple as well. I am a much bigger fan of its iOS ecosystem than Google’s Android wild west. I find the latter has way more security risks.
For the most part, I do too. But sometimes they make a change and I have to scratch my head and wonder why. Because of the design of the phone it’s really hard for me to hold it up to my ear and talk. So for years, I have pressed the speaker button and lo and behold. The speaker would turn on. But for some reason, they felt the need to change the speaker button to the audio button and when I press the audio button, it wants me to know what do I want to talk on the speaker, my iPad, another iPhone? All I wanted was the speaker. It frustrates the hell out of me when they do that. If I wanted to talk on my iPad, I would’ve used my iPad and not my phone.