I never thought I would write a post like this. A year ago, I was just about convinced that There would never be a need for more storage on a phone, especially as things moved more and more to the cloud. Need photo storage? Check. Need some place to put your cat breading videos? Check. (What the hell is cat breading, you ask? Google it. I promise you’ll laugh, and no harm came to any cat involved.)
There are parts of the country where technology has passed by, barely putting a foot down before running off for greener pastures. Places like BF Egypt, Arkansas, where I currently reside. Service is spotty in, well, spots, even if you’re with one of the two carriers that actually has towers in the area. If you want to know where BF Egypt is, Google it. Betcha can’t find it.
You know what else is spotty? Internet.
The very basic, I-eat-cake necessity of the free world, isn’t even found everywhere in the free world.
Sure, you can go to pretty much any major city and find 20, 30, 50, 500 Mbits down, easy. Some cities have 1 Gbit connections, enough speed to download 40 GB in 4minutes flat and make any Mother’s Basement Dweller (or MBD for short) slobber with envy.
BFE? not so much. Oh no. Here, we’re fortunate to have 6 Mbit down, and that’s if we’re lucky. There are even places where you can’t get internet, which means reliance on phone data for surfing the web. Absolutely terrible.
Storage and Hamsters
Which brings me to my next point. Phone storage. It may seem kind of off the beaten path, but the two things: ñetwork speed and phone storage are about as connected as it gets.
If you don’t have much phone storage you have to rely on backing up to some Google or Apple server somewhere in the all-encompassing term we call the cloud. If the speed of the network is slow, and as things such as pictures and videos grow larger, it means it will take up that much more space on the cloud, that much more time to back up, and use that much more data to upload all that stuff to the cloud.
In a place where the fastest internet connection is the equivalent of two pairs of hamsters spinning wheels, the last thing you need is to either use up all your data trying to upload all that stuff because you’re out of phone space, delete your precious photos and videos to make room for more, or try to figure out how to transfer it all to a computer in an easy manner (someone Google how to get pics and videos off an iPhone for me, Kthanks). There is another option.
I haven’t mentioned anything about phones yet.
Phones
If the above situation applies to you, Here’s a list of phones to not get when you’re chomping at the bit for that upgrade or new phone.
- iPhone (any) less than 128 GB. I’m not really listing the iPhone first for any particular reason. It’s a perfectly good phone. However, Apple is notorious for screwing people over with the base model. 16GB? that’s enough storage to store an update or two. after that, you’re out of storage. A lot of people make the mistake of judging an iPhone by a $100 difference. “Oh, I won’t need that much storage.” What they’re really thinking is, “I don’t want to pay an extra $100. You’re doing it over a 24 – 30 month period, people. It’s four (4) dollars more. If that’s a deal breaker, maybe think about not upgrading. You can’t afford it.
- Any android phone without an SD Card slot. With S7 series, Samsung did itself a favor (and us) and brought back the SD card slot. It supports up to 256GB, which is more than enough for anyone’s pictures and videos, unless you’re taking hours and hours of 4k video. Yes, you can do that on an s7. That being said, here’s a (short)list of phones you might be considering, but shouldn’t.
Galaxy S6
Galaxy s6 edge.
Note 5.
These three phones are not a good option if you’re in the sticks. No sd card slot and only 32 GB. If you’re a light user, you might get away with only 32 GB. If you have kids or play lot of games, you’re probably going to be filling that storage up with apps, photos, and videos, which means the inconvenience of having to plug it into a computer and dragging photos off the phone or hoping all the photos back up in a reasonable amount of time. 1080p video and 4k video can take awhile and a lot of bandwidth.
Google Pixel less than 128GB.
Google Pixel XL less than 128 GB.
These 2 phones also suffer from having to upload everything. Google provides unlimited photo storage at maximum size for these two phones, which is great, except that if you are using a 4g hotspot as internet or a very slow connection, you’re either going to run out of space or run out of data. Do yourself a favor and avoid the lesser GB flavors of these.
That’s it. You thought this was going to be a long list, huh? The great thing about most android phones is that the SD card has not disappeared as everyone thought. In fact, it seems to be making a comeback and is especially useful in the low to mid-range phone market.
Even the flagship phone market, with the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5, V20, the list goes on, has seen a bounce back of the SD card slot.
If you can think of any other phones that don’t have an SD card slot, leave me a comment and let me know and I’ll add it to the list. Until then have a great whatever it is in your time zone. Thanks for reading.
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