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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
You are an extreme outlier. Most people don’t have that much stuff on their phone.
I agree it would be nice if phones started at 256gb, but honestly the average person won’t come close to that in 2 years, even if they don’t know about Google photos.
Not that extreme. Recording alone on a newer phone uses 1GB in 8 minutes and that’s not even 4k.
Then you have games. One of the most popular games in the world is Genshin Impact and its been downloaded 50,000,000+ times from Google play. It also currently needs 20GB of space.
Sure, most people don’t need over 128GB, but ones that do are far from extreme outliers. Personally I travel a lot and don’t usually have consistent data when I do, so I keep a couple hundred gigs of TV shows and movies on my phone to watch, along with games.
That depends a lot.
Photos takr up more and more space. Videos too (will vary on settings)
Same with apps (especially games)
Everyone in this thread talking about phones more expensive than my car.
Speaking as a person with a $120 phone, I honestly don’t have an issue with 128GB for a mobile device. I don’t film on this thing daily, and the largest apps I have are Sonic Forces and Mario Kart, so I’m pretty much never going to have to worry about using the space up.
That is fine, and it’s your choice. All we want is to also have choice instead of phone manufacturers either refusing to make models with large storage, or outright ripping us off for the privilege.
25gb of pictures
Either you don’t have a backup of those because you don’t care, in which case you should delete them to make room, or you don’t have a backup of those and would be devastated if you lost them, which means you should back them up to the cloud, then delete them to make room. An SD card slot would be nice, you’re right there, but you’re not exactly cornered with no options here. You’re just dismissing good options because they’re not an SD card.
I have like 71gb of pictures on my phone (50k pics) and I like it that way, why would I delete them? For them to sit on my PC or in the cloud never to be looked at again?
I often go through photos on my phone, it’s like a history of the last few years and I find myself scrolling back to find a picture at least once a week.
I could use the cloud service but it’d take so long loading the thumbnails that it’s completely pointless.
“why do you put these photos on the wall? You’d be devastated if someone stole them, you should rather keep them in a box under your bed” that’s a dumb take.
You’re gonna lose them all one day.
No, because they’re both in the cloud and on my PC.
My bad, I got you confused with OP and their “under no circumstances will I back my stuff up to either the cloud or local storage” attitude. I can’t count how many people I’ve seen who feel that way right up until the moment where they’re saying “What do you mean you can’t recover them?” I sometimes get a bit preachy about it because I’ve seen people lose their wedding pics or pics of dead relatives, and I personally lost a bunch of the stuff I worked on as an undergrad that’s just gone forever now.
Yep, it’s heartbreaking. I accidentally did a full format of an HDD that had pictures of my friend who had died on it and a bunch of other stuff from the prior ~10 years. My heart sunk when I realised that I hadn’t backed up the folder beforehand. I now have a physical backup in a box, my drives are a raid 1 and I have most of the important stuff in OneDrive, which is handy if I get any crypto malware that encrypts all my data, because it has revision history. I’m not going to get caught out like that again.
But at the same time, I’m going to carry the photos on my phone over to my next phone too.
The only reason I haven’t switch from my current phone(Huawei) to a Pixel with Graphene OS. How the fuck am I supposed to migrate the 190 Gb of used date to it when it only has 128 Gb and I can’t use my SD-Card any longer.
I can live with loosing the headphone jack or the fingerprint on the back(even if that is pretty nice) but why would they need to takey storage options. ('Cause more money for them when I have to pay for there cloud)
Not to diminish the serious issue of lack of freedom of choice in phones, but what the fuck do you need 190GB of data on hand at all times for?
Right? I’m a fucking data hoarder with 30+TB of shit at home and my phone has less than 30 gigs of apps/photo/videos/etc at any point in time lmao.
I honestly think most people who complain about storage space are bad at managing their storage space.
Unless you’re a photographer by trade and need all your photos on hand in RAW format (even though good photographers have storage drives on hand), you don’t need 200+ GB of media.
Download what you need for however long you need it, then delete it when you’re done. Nobody is going through 200GB of music, shows, and movies frequently enough to need it on hand at all times.
Well, I do get ur point but for 99% of the world out there, 128Gigs is honestly enough. Eg. I have around 70+ gigs free atm with a small music collection of 10-12 Gigs (all flacs) and some apps.
I seriously don’t understand how people fill up 256GB+ on their phones. There’s really no reason to carry all that stuff on your phone and if you need movies and TV shows, just download the ones you want before going on a trip and delete them as you watch.
Yup. Most of my media lives at my home.
I kinda hate watching any good movie/Tv show on phone. Ruins the experience. So mostly only Music is there with some YT Videos that I may need/like.
I don’t really have that problem myself, but I fully agree anyway. It does not matter what your use case is. It is 2023, flash storage is cheap and we can get much more storage for any other device for a fraction of the cost. $100 is ridiculously overpriced.
Honestly by now I would have expected 1 TB to be the default, but somehow we got stuck with low internal storage for the past 10 years.
My phone (redmi note 10) has a memory card slot and dual sim slots. I recently bought a 128Gb memory card for around 10$. I’ll always go for a phone with a microSD slot.