I am in the process of looking between repairing my phone or switching to a new one. And the no brainer evolution to the OnePlus 7 Pro I have is a Pixel phone. Pixel Phones are definitely not perfect, I know that the battery would fall faster than other phones but hey, that’s ok, google chip in it, possibility to go GrapheneOs, all good.
But the A versions only having 128 GB, and needing to pay 100 extra Euro on the Normal and Pro phone for 256GB is ridiculous, and not allowing me to add a SD card for that! Is insane I restarted my phone in December fresh from zero, and in the last 9 months I used 163 GB of memory. 48GB of it is my music on Deezer, for which I pay to be able to download “HIFI” files which I am not willing to trade for using less space on my phone, I work in a place with no 4G, I’ve got a few playlist I switch between. The rest is 25 GB of Pictures, 7GB of games. 44GB of apps.
Now the answer to this is “Well now with your Pixel phone you can use the Google Cloud, Google Docs blablabla”. Something insights by Google offering 3 month of Google one and 3 month of YouTube premium when you buy a Pixel phone. So much cloud that’s soo cool! And you can just redownload things when you need it. Well I don’t want to redownload my musics everyday when I listen to them, I don’t want to trade and limit what I would call normal use. I know not everyone will resonate with this, but the carbon impact on bandwidth used from cloud in 4G is important.
Normalise SD cards, Normalise not using the Cloud as a solution for everything
Update 2 Days later
Hey, writting here because this post has brought a lot of people to talk about storage of data on phone, which is quite nice. I am writting here just because a lot of comments are repeating certain points and It wouldn’t be useful answering to all of them if after their will be more comments saying the same thing.
I am not saying Cloud = Bad. It’s great we have a place out there where we can Store Data in case anything happens. I simply wish either brand gave us more choice on data capacity, seeing a Pixel 7a only at 128 gb ain’t cool, let me make a choice. Seing a Pixel & with 128gb or having to pay an extra 100€ for 256gb when a sd card is 30€ is not cool.
A personal server is in my plans, and it’s one of the projects I’m the most impatient to have.
I understand that I have a different use of phones then the average, I simply want to be able to adapt the tools I use to my different use.
I have taken the step to take a look at the storage in my phone by curiosity and to look with a different eye my consomption of Storage, and have deleted 3gb of games, and 3gb of apps that where useless. I’ve also started looking into my photos and took out 3gb of photos I had which where useless. And I think there is more photos I’ll delete, I am not done on that of course
My signal discussion are important to me, I am in a Long Distance Relationship, and discussions I have with my SO on Signal are the major part of my relationship, and I cherish them. I have set up signal so that it makes when charging at night a copy of my discussions, and when I have Sincthing, it loads the conv to a HDD Drive on my PC. That being said, in the floders I found bugged temp file from saves that did not end, for a total of 20 gb of Signal discussions (oof lol) which where deleted too. How ridiculus was it? Well in Storage>Files the weight of total files dropped from 20,68gb to 0,68gb
Anyway, I am now at 132gb :D! I’m not writting this because I am feeling attacked or to defend myself, just as a small update and because these are reocuring comment that’s all, i’m still anwering here and there if you arrive a bit latter to the post, it’s impressive from lemmy I feel to still be receiving comments and have a discussion that continues 2 day after a post. Usually on Reddit posts would die in 6 hours, and their where no dick’s in the chat. I’ve read every single message, and answers other people did
Normalise SD cards
I never stopped. Any phone I buy must have an SD slot. Problem solved.
Same here, I don’t understand people buying phones without SD card and than complaining about it.
They sent a message to manufacturer that they don’t want SD cart slot and of course in the next year evel less phones will have it.
People call this “voting with your money”
And it doesn’t work unless it is done en mass. As individuals it just turns into a preference.
It sounds like you have a very specific set of requirements that requires a specific type of premium phone. Not everybody needs 128 GB of storage eon their phone (mine only has 64). I agree that a lot of storage and SD-card slots are good features to have on phones, but the truth is that not everyone needs those. Each feature will add cost and require more resources to build, and for a lot of people not having them will work just fine.
My mum is constantly complaining about not having enough storage on her phone but won’t switch away from an iPhone to and Android with an SD slot.
Some people just like to bitch about a problem not fix it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t sd card slots cheaper than 128GB of storage? Give me a phone with 32GB, allow me to pay for a 1TB SD card if i need it. Seems like a win-win. Hell, they can sell the phone with their own sd card in it already if they really want.
Are sd card slots cheaper than 128 GB of flash storage chips? I’m not sure, but yes, probably. You would also need to factor in the additional complexity of allowing physical access to the slot, which would take some additional designing and a few more components. The sd card itself will probably be a more expensive and slower than integrated flash storage. By contrast, it is probably extremely easy to just shove some flash storage chips in a phone. Still, I agree that it sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
Reward Sony, they have low, mid, and high end phones that still have SD cards and headphone jacks.
While I respect them for their hardware, they need to up their software game. They’ve been left in the dust on update lifespan by Samsung and Google. I’m also miffed that they don’t have much care for specification accuracy (or at least didn’t when I got my US Xperia III).
Agreed, I wish they had longer update timelines and were easily available in the US. But they are easily among the best overall phones with a headphone jack and expandable storage.
I was so close to pulling the trigger on a Sony Xperia. Then I found out they only do 2 years of software updates.
Also, there were limited options for custom ROMS
As much as I’d love to, they’re simply too expensive, by far. Amd I’ve had several Sony’s compact models before that have each left me with a malfunctioning screen after about a year.
I bought the Xeperia 1iii for exactly this reason…and it was the worst phone I’ve ever owned.
The camera sucks, the phone froze all the time, many apps were incompatible.
It was a nightmare. I wanted so badly to love it and I tried and tried for 9mo, and the traded it in for a Pixel 7 pro.
IDK if I can trust Sony again, but I really want the SD card and headphone jack.
Have the 1 III and now 1 V (that case for the 1 III wasn’t as strong as I hoped, lol)
It’s a significant improvement, no more heat issues, the camera is legit great without messing with settings now (the previous generations were much too far oriented to people used to editing RAW), it’s what the 1 III should’ve been
Since the original PlayStation in the 90s, I have never owned a Sony product that didn’t disappoint, or just outright fail.
My wife had a Sony video camera. It broke in a little under 2 years. My Sony car CD player just one day decided to refuse to eject a CD. A place I worked at had Sony Viao laptops as standard, and were forever replacing PSUs and screens. I looked at buying a Sony smart TV, but looked at their forums first, and decided the firmware/software was so full of bugs which were never going to be fixed, that I’d be better off with a CRT display and a VHS machine than whatever they were selling. My brother had a Sony digital camera, which one day, decided it just didn’t want to power on.
I wouldn’t buy anything Sony if I expected it to last longer than a month.
Mid tier phones have sd card support, 3.5mm jack replaceable battery.
You only have to know where to look.
Ok, now which ones have all three, plus a metal frame?
I would throw so much money at such a phone. If you add “usable software/hardware”, i can maybe find 3 of the 5.
Or a decent camera.
Sony, except the replaceable battery part
The camera isn’t good enough on the Xperias. It’s getting there with the V, but still not up to par with the others.
All the cameras are decent. They all have loads of megapixels and focus on what you point them at.
If you want a camera that takes your photo and auto-magically makes it look like a better photo than the one you actually took, by merging images from several completely separate cameras, you don’t actually want a good camera, you want a good machine learning model for pretty photos and a good sensor fusion algorithm. In which case Google is your guy. Or Apple.
There’s more to a camera/photo than megapixels. Image processing and Computational photography are significantly better on flagships than on budgets and mid rangers. At this stage it’s almost the biggest difference.
Yeah! And none of that stuff is actually required to take a good photo/have a decent camera as good as the ones you could buy at the store in 2005. It’s all new, optional enhancements.
Depends what you consider good and decent. A good photographer can take a good photo with a bad camera, but a good camera can make a bad photographers photos look better at least. A flagship camera takes a much better photo than a mid ranger does. The lenses are bigger, they’re better lenses, and their ISP is better.
Thanka for sharing the knowledge!
Okay, the others are more common but
@Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com wrote:
removable battery
Are you saying that such phones are still manufactured in 2023? like, with the ability to only remove the back case? I gotta find these in the stores where I live.
They hype 4k/8k recording capabilities but the average buyer is unlikely to realise exactly how fast this eats storage.
I had to buy a new phone when my last one broke. Needed S Pen & external SD so I opted for a used Note 20 Ultra in conjunction with the same SD card ive used since I first bought a smart phone.
I self host my own Nextcloud but cloud isnt the answer. Even in this day & age in a big city or driving, streaming is not available all the time. I insist that everything important is available offline: maps, notes, all media be it music, podcasts, audio books …even movies/TV shows seeing as these phones can easily be connected to a TV for use with Kodi or similar. Another thing is recording footage of holidays etc for editing. It all takes up space.
I’m of the opinion the external SD was only removed for profiteering reasons.
For Christmas I accidentally restarted my phone, and saw my nephews for the first time. Wanted to make some videos of them. Turns out for some reason the phone was in 4k 6fps (yay)
deleted by creator
So you haven’t bought a phone in the last decade?
Come on, the A52s wasn’t that long ago. Only in 2022 did Samsung remove the headphone jack from their A-lineup.
deleted by creator
Samsung has low end cheap phones. You just nitpick everything to suit your damned argument.
Xperia I V. Using it rn
What options are there that don’t make a compromise on something like camera quality?
Every phone you buy these days is a compromise. The entire market went to shit around 2015.
With a headphone jack, Asus Zenphone, with an SD card slot? Good question.
Even the Zenfone is making some compromises since it doesn’t have a telephoto.
And honestly I care more about an SD slot than a headphone jack since an adapter is not a big issue.
Telephoto is seen as more of an additional feature rather than a core thing phones should have imo, especially as the telephoto cost to add is likely significantly higher than a sd card or headphone jack.
Sony phones
But if you also want replaceable batteries, it’s the Samsung industrial oriented smartphone range which is left standing with all the notable features still there
Whaaaaaat? A quick ddg search hasn’t told me anything about Samsung industrial range phones
TIL about this line. Great hardware. Thank you for the link!
Looked around for LineageOS but there is none, although someone was able to root it. So it may actually be usable for non-corporate users too.
deleted by creator
I really wish the Japanese camera companies have the ability to come up with a camera that can maintain a proper always-on connection to your phone, then auto-switch to the wifi connection to transfer photos (JPEG only) when needed. That way I’ll just get a small compact and decouple the camera quality from my phone purchasing decision.
Sadly the Japanese are even more incompetent, so that’s not happening anytime soon.
I have a smaller MILC that I love, but the reality is that nothing beats a camera that you always have with you.
The cameras I am saving for, the Fuji XT-4 allegedly offers this feature, over bluetooth though, I am hoping it is a smooth enough experience because what you describe really is the dream.
Take photos and have them instantly on my phone which auto uploads them to cloud storage.
Haven’t seen a camera that can do that. The Canons can’t, was trying in the showroom. The “Auto Transfer” feature shuts down when the app is not in the foreground, and has to be restarted manually each time. What rubbish. No wonder they’ve lost so much market share.
Never, where did you read that? :D
There’s no excuse for a lack of expandable storage, theres no excuse for a lack of a 3.5mm port. Phones have been stagnant for the last 3/4 years.
The new iPhones are coming out soon, and since they’ve likely replaced the silencer switch with an Bixby button, that’ll surely shake up and revolutionize the market with it’s yet another 150€ base price increase
Not putting a hole in the device envelope is an excuse; no holes makes it easier to waterproof. Somebody out there is going for the hermetically sealed wireless charging only speaker in the screen no holes phone that you can take to the bottom of the ocean and is immune to pocket lint.
But if it’s got holes in it it really ought to have these.
Theres plenty of IP68 rated phones with headphone ports and they are not even ridiculously priced flagships.
A headphone jack isn’t a hole it’s a closed port with electrical contacts inside of it just like your charging port. The back of the port doesn’t open up into the rest of the phone internals.
But you still have to set things up so the jack can be electrically connected to the board, but also waterproofly attached to the frame of the phone. And the jack itself needs to be a good one that has electrical connections between the inside and outside but is internally watertight.
Presumably there are headphone jack engineers out there making this happen.
Presumably there are headphone jack engineers out there making this happen.
This has already been a thing forever.
Let’s also not forget how much manufacturers are charging for these devices. If you bought a phone for $19.99, I could excuse them skimping on low quality ports. When you’re paying $1500 for a device, I expect the best of the best to be inside it.
Imagine if we had this - physically tiny - and established standard how we could let the user add extra storage space to their small electronic devices.
I don’t know, maybe SanDisk could develop something like this, some Micro format storage device. That’s not a bad name, is it? Something with Micro, and SanDisk? Yeah, someone should create that!
well it’d obviously have to be digital, and it would be nice if it were secure as well
maybe down the line we could get a high capacity version, or even xtreme capacity
A Floppy disk?
It does sound like they are selling 128G of flash storage at a weirdly high cost.
I think “44GB of apps” might be part of your problem though. There’s no legit reason for them to be that big, they’re all just shipping their own 4k prerendered buttons, full copies of React Native and half of the Node package ecosystem, and the same fifty tracking SDKs. 128G was a perfectly reasonable size for a pocket computer, until people decide you need to ship like a whole OS in every app and you need an app for like every store you go to and your messenger needs motion graphics for every emoji in Unicode.
I guess you could try offloading photos to another computer for archival storage? Keeping every photo you ever took on the camera is going to use a lot of space.
The Heaviest one being Signal (8gb) because I have all my discussions of the last 9 Months, after they are around 1gb and lower, since i posted my messag, i’ve deleted 5gb of app too. I also need to check those photo, I have to move some to my drives, and I have I am certain a lot of them that can be destroyed
25gb of pictures… I mean… So you need all of that stored locally so it’s accessible wherever you need it while you’re in the middle of nowhere in the woods or a desert?
44gb of non games apps? 🤔
You realise you might be a power user that just bought the wrong device?
The problem is, there aren’t many “not wrong” devices that address the issue. And simply wanting storage because of poor network a lot of the time is a fine reason that doesn’t make someone a power user.
I’m finding plenty of phones with either 256gb or expandable storage though, I don’t think it’s much of an issue, it’s just a person that didn’t take their needs into consideration when buying their device…
I mean, there’s plenty of other requirements for a phone. Expandable storage doesn’t exist in a lot of popular devices that have plenty of updates past two years, or worse, the US (not sure where poster is). SD cards aren’t common especially in power-user type phones.
I guarantee you this guy was looking at ultra budget devices with 3 year old hardware and recommending one of these to someone they just referred to as a “power user.” The current smartphone market is homogenous garbage targeted at influencers.
Yeah, this seems like a really weird complaint to me. My Pixel 6 Pro has 128 GB, and I’ve only just barely passed 100 GB used like a month ago, after having this phone for a couple years now.
I get that there will be niche use cases, but I feel like if you know you’ve got a niche use case, then you should probably be taking that into consideration when purchasing your device in the first place. For the average user, though, I feel like 128 GB is more than plenty.
“it’s not a problem for me so obviously everyone else is just weird. Anyone who does anything differently is doing something wrong.”
Ok.
I literally acknowledged the fact that niche use cases exist. Are you that desperate to argue on the internet that you’re going to ignore half of the comment you’re replying to? Jesus Christ, get over yourself.
You defined niche as something that doesn’t affect you. That was my point. Because you ended up falling in line with where commercial services push you does not mean everyone else should accept it too.
You defined niche as something that doesn’t affect you.
I absolutely did nothing of the sort. Please try reading.
The problem is OP complaining and then contradicting themselves by confirming that the reason they don’t have enough space is because they hoard things on their phone… As I asked them, why would they need to have 25gb of pictures available when they don’t have signal to access their cloud storage?
Some people look at pictures they’ve taken. If they look at different things each time, who’s going to be like “hey, I’m in a 2014 kind of mood, let’s download those pictures as I might want to look at them later.”
Not everyone just takes pictures and forgets about them. And many don’t want to even trust cloud services with your data. Google already said all your photos will be used in training their AI. Some people may not like that.
They also have 44gb of non games apps and deleted 5gb after posting…
If you don’t trust cloud services get a phone with more storage then, it’s not something that you just didn’t know would happen…
get a phone with more storage then
That’s… did you read the actual post? It seems you did, but I’m curious how this sentence of yours the preceded to actually be typed by you.
Yes I did and OP could have paid 100€ for more storage or simply buy a phone with an SD card slot.
They came from a 4.5 years old phone, it’s not as if they would have suffered to sacrifice a bit of performance to find a modern with enough storage in their budget range.
store the raw or originals elsewhere; store smaller, resized ones on the phone for sharing with others or boredom browsing. 5-15mb files turn into 100-300kb or so.
I don’t think anyone is arguing there aren’t workarounds. But there shouldn’t need to be. Why have to go through extra work when there’s rarely any reason a phone shouldn’t include an SD card slot. Adding my own, but I think replaceable battery is a good one too. I’m not a fan of disposable electronics.
4k video fills storage up quick. Why slap 17 camera sensors on a phone if there’s nowhere to store the data? I personally throw movies/tv on mine when traveling for me and my kid. 100GB is about 7 or 8 movies in 1080p.
This is like claiming you’ve never needed a truck to haul things so you can’t understand why anyone else would need one and anyone who does must be some fringe weirdo.
Like I told the other guy, I already acknowledged that niche use cases exist, and explained the steps that a user should take in that situation.
And like the other person said, you keep referring to this as a ‘niche use’ based on nothing more than your personal experience with your own device.
No, it’s niche because it’s niche. If it wasn’t niche, phones would be built for that use case in mind to begin with. This has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the current state of devices available to consumers.
Saying the word ‘niche’ 19 times in a comment doesn’t make it true. Manufacturers aren’t making these phones because it’s more profitable to push you onto a subscription service for cloud storage or bend you over on hardware costs. We’re in this state because they know we don’t have a choice in the matter as we can only buy what they offer to us. What are you going to do, not use a smartphone?
That’s an entirely different argument to make.
The fact is that there are phones out there that fill OP’s niche need. Other comments in this thread even recommended phones that meet that need. They’re not as common, though. Why is that? Because… it’s… what’s the word… Dang, right on the tip of my tongue. Aw, oh well, it’ll come to me later.
my laptop at home has 64gb emmc, and nearly half of that is basically windows, firefox and vlc (lan playback).
it’s a consumption device. not a storage device.
they mention not having network access, so they want to consume stuff without network.
There’s a reason many streaming services offered downloads later and not as the first feature. It’s because people want to download things. Not everyone has constant WiFi around them.
You can consume downloaded things.
On the photo side I definitely need to work on it I’m certain there is so much I could delete and things I could move to my drives I fully agree on that
Since making my post I’ve also deleted 5gb of apps
I don’t think anyone builds a device for power users these days despite the astronomical prices of current smartphones.
The “power user” phones don’t have SD slots either though.
SD cards are irreplaceable to me because my phone does its backups into it. If my phone dies, I still can pull it out and have everything I need. And I’m not going to give my personal data to someone elses computer in a datacenter.
If the phone is lost/stolen/damaged, your SD card could be inaccessible too. Your backups are your business, but you are opening yourself up to all kinds data loss if your only backups are stored within the device in question.
of course. I do copy my files once in a while, but my phone does app backups to the card every few days.
You might like something called Syncthing. It’s a FOSS data replication thing that doesn’t store stuff on other people’s servers but if you have a computer or some other place you want to throw files, it can keep things synchronised with your phone, without any cloud storage crap .
I highly recommend syncthing
Irs free.
You gotta set it up on all devices that sync anything but its very set and forget
128GB as the baseline is rubbish. Even 256GB is average considering the amount of high quality media we deal with nowadays. The amount of money these companies pull in from “upgrading” your storage is amazing, it costs dollars to upgrade from 128 to 256 but they’ll charge you a $100 premium for the privilege
Nah it’s fine for those of us who don’t live our whole lives inside the smartphone world. My desktop PCs, servers, and laptops are where I keep my important files, not on a phone.
I think for the majority of people 128 is plenty. If you need more than that you need to buy a phone with an SD slot. I’ve never had a phone without one personally.
What decent phones come with SD slots?
I currently have a Fairphone, and of course it includes a micro-SD slot. You’re supposed to use it for 5+ years, it’d be daft if you cannot expand it.
I’m writing this on a Samsung A54, 256gb version, with an additional microSD slot. I fail to understand how people need more complex and expensive phones than this. Besides maybe wireless charging (which can be argued as a gimmick on its own), this phone has everything.
Besides maybe wireless charging (which can be argued as a gimmick on its own), this phone has everything.
My bedside charging setup (single dock for phone, watch and headphones, no spider nest of cables my son could pull on when he was younger) would disagree.
Sounds cool
It doesn’t have “everything” if you want a flagship device, especially the cameras.
Yeah, everything is very subjective. I’ve never had much of a use of super high-end cameras.
What other flagship features are there?
Performance, screen tech, build quality.
All right, that’s fair. I guess I’m not the target audience, as all of these are perfectly fine for me on mid-range phones. (I’ve had flagships before, but these differences never mattered to me personally.)
If it had a headphone jack, I’d be fine with that phone. That’s a critical omission, though.
The problem with these phones is they show their age quick because they’re built with outdated hardware. Yours is less than 6 months old, but you’d need to buy 2-3 replacement phones in the time that it’d take for a flagship specced phone to slow to the same level (provided we were still allowed to buy ‘flagship’ phones with power features like expandable storage among others).
deleted by creator
I do a lot of torrenting on my phone, I’m very frustrated with the current market of flagships. I have to constantly purge my downloads
I used to store music locally and I can’t have 100gb of music any more because my phone is only 128. I used to download entire TV shows at once, and now I have to do it one season at a time and delete it as I watch.
Obviously it’s not a big deal because I’ve just settled for doing it, but ffs SD card slots are cheap as shit and most of these phone manufacturers also make lower end phones with SD card slots.
I used to download the top of the month musics only, to get a cool panel of music’s I liked only for when I’ll need them. Well in lossless they took after a year more than 110GB of storage. I stopped when seeing it so large
Why do you need 100GB of music? Get a Plex server and stream from that. You can still download stuff from your phone if you need to. But there’s no way you’re away from an internet connection for 100GB of music worth of time.
It’s a management problem, not a storage problem.
At the time I worked offshore, so yeah I was away from an internet connection pretty consistently.
Also stop recommending Plex, it’s going downhill. Jellyfin is better.
Also, this implies that I both own a spare computer and have both unlimited data and unlimited wifi.
You are intending to buy a phone from a cloud company whose phone making business is an afterthought.
Get a phone from a phone making company whose cloud is an aftertaught.
But the camera :( and GrapheneOs
