Mobiles with Micro SD Memory Card Slot?

My wife is after a new phone, and takes a lot of pics/vids of our son, so would like a mobile with a micro SD card slot and a half decent camera.  She prefers Samsungs, but from what I gather unless you want to pay a massive amount then the A55 is the highest model with this feature still available on contract?

She currently has a S20 FE which has seen better days

Can anyone else recommend any other reliable Android phones currently available on contract with a SD card slot?

Thank you in advance!

Sony Xperia 10 V

I have an XCover5. It has micro SD, plus 2 SIM slots, plus removable battery. Waterproof too.

I don’t know what the newer XCovers are like.

Thanks guys, much appreciated, I’ll take a look 🙂

Flash memory is basically trash silicon, it’s the stuff that’s no good for anything else. That’s why SD cards are so unreliable unless you pay for industrial ones.

Once I came to terms with that and the fact it’s all backed up remotely anyway it stopped being an issue.

I’d just buy something with the biggest on board storage and concentrate on the camera.

Odd, the only time I’ve ever had an SD card act up was when used in a Raspberry pi.

The main thing that really annoys me about iPhones is the lack of an SD slot. Still use an iPhone tho.

Motorola phones are decent VFM and will take SD or an extra sim.

I would suggest that she reconsiders her workflow.

She “takes a lot of pics/vids of our son” and then what?  Is she going to fill up a device’s storage in a weekend?  Meanwhile, elsewhere on STW is a thread from a few days ago where a member asking for help recovering photos.  What happens when she loses it?

Get them off the phone.  Either back up to the cloud or copy them off to a PC periodically.  Walking around with every video you’ve ever taken in the last ten years stored in your back pocket isn’t sustainable.

Android phone. Auto backup to Google Photos, then download and back up elsewhere (I backup to both Flickr and an external SSD).

Any Pixel phone will see you right as far as camera goes.

Watching with interest. I can’t get on with my S20FE, and also no fan of the ‘pay more for internal storage and pay again to store your stuff in clouds’ model.

Flash memory is basically trash silicon, it’s the stuff that’s no good for anything else. That’s why SD cards are so unreliable unless you pay for industrial ones.

Hmm, not had one go kaput for years. One in my bar cam, 256gb Kingston – always on commuting, overwrting, re-writing… reliable as the bike its mounted on 😛

Watching with interest. I can’t get on with my S20FE, and also no fan of the ‘pay more for internal storage and pay again to store your stuff in clouds’ model.

50GB is 99p a month for iCloud. I can’t see any point in additional phone storage when you can punt pictures in pretty much real time to a secure location automatically.

Have a look on Hotukdeals. There are some great deals on A55s and S24s sim free direct from Samsung and forget being tied into a duff contract. Also as everyone has said, forget SDs.

The S24 has a proper optical zoom and all round better performance so worth the extra if you can stretch to it.

Wot cougar said, get them in the cloud.

I have 100GB on google that’s so cheap i don’t even know how much it costs. That’s available 100% of the time (so far, i’ve had it 10 years) and about 60% full. Probably 10% of that i could delete.

Occasionally down load to a local disc and store a back up.

Hmm, not had one go kaput for years. One in my bar cam, 256gb Kingston – always on commuting, overwrting, re-writing… reliable as the bike its mounted on 😛

No, he’s right,  For your own comparison, when was the last time your or anyone’s phone died because the internal memory died?

But everyone else is right, if there’s stuff you want to keep then back it up somewhere, there’s no benefit to having an SD card in a phone, unless you plan to leave the backup unencrypted and physically take the card out each time to transfer the images.

Any Pixel phone will see you right as far as camera goes.

I’ve got the new Pixel 8 with more memory than I’ll ever likely use.  The camera isn’t great though.  Particularly of dark / black subjects it applies so much processing that it ends up looking like an the worst overshaprened, HDR’d to shit,  AI enhanced garbage that you’d see on the Flickr homepage.  It know why they’ve done it, and it’s great, but it needs an off switch for when I’d actually like some shadows in the image please.

That and the fill-in flash and best-take get in the way unless the subject is a face.

when was the last time your or anyone’s phone died because the internal memory died?

I’d say it’s vanishingly unlikely, but non-zero.

The fact of the matter is, hardware can fail.  Sometimes catastrophically and without warning.  Doesn’t matter whether that’s “cheap silicon” or the system board or whatever, the outcome is the same.

If you value your data, back it up.  There’s only so many times I (and everyone else) can say this.  The answer to “can you help me to recover…” is no I can’t, sorry.

The fact of the matter is, hardware can fail.  Sometimes catastrophically and without warning.  Doesn’t matter whether that’s “cheap silicon” or the system board or whatever, the outcome is the same.

Yep, but for comparison in my last job I probably threw out more than a hundred pro-level CF cards (out of ~300 in rotation at any one time for about a year), and never had a recorder die.  In the end we hacked the recorders so they would give a status indication based on whether data was being written between the cache and the memory itself not on whether the system was in record because almost all failures were on the cards themselves and you wouldn’t be aware until you looked at the screen and it would give error codes for cache full / cache slow / cache buffer insufficient etc.

So yep, first thing to do is actually back stuff up.

2nd thing is I’d buy a phone with onboard storage over SD storage every time.  The only advantage to SD is being able to take the card out and back it up whilst shooting on the next one.  Which isn’t a use case for phones.

I haven’t been through anything like that many but I’d concur.

A lot of the network gear we used to have used CF cards as storage.  I couldn’t put figures against a failure rate but let’s say “not uncommon.”  I kept a bag of the things in my lab, salvaged from broken routers.  It was typical to have to rummage through the bag to find one that wasn’t sodded (not helped by engineers throwing faulty ones back into my supply rather than walk five yards to the WEEE bin outside).

Cheap SD cards, it’s not a case of if they’ll fail but when.

I’ve had one SanDisk uSD fail, replaced without quibble under a 10-year warranty.

I’ve never had internal storage fail on a mobile device.

The main thing that really annoys me about iPhones is the lack of an SD slot.

But why, when it will automatically backup to the Cloud, where you’ve got tens of Gigs available for less than the cost of a cheap SD Card per month.
Having had iPhones from the 3G, and now on a 15 Pro Max with 1Tb of internal storage, the number of times I’ve wished my phone had removable storage is exactly zero, especially when the photos pop up on my iPad at home, with no effort from me.

Rather than you all bitching about how those of us who prefer SD cards are idiots, maybe we could have some suggestions for decent phones with SD cards? Ta.

The cloud is ok when you can get a signal. I want all of my music all the time.

It know why they’ve done it, and it’s great, but it needs an off switch for when I’d actually like some shadows in the image please.

See if you can still get the focal app, that used to be a quick/easy way to get access to the “unprocessed” camera data.
i’m on S22 Ultra, which has a v.good camera already, so i’ve not had to use focal for ages.

Rather than you all bitching about how those of us who prefer SD cards are idiots, maybe we could have some suggestions for decent phones with SD cards? Ta.

Rather than walking about with that huge chip on your shoulder how about you see it for the helpful advice that it is and get on with your life.

I believe the answer has already been given according to the criteria the OP set. You have a choice of a handful.

 that huge chip

Wayhey! Is it a silicon one?! 😂

Clouds work for you – great. They don’t for me.

And USB cables? Do they not work for you either?

On board storage is just better, you can use it for apps too. But if that doesn’t work either I’m sure you’ll find a million lists if you fling “phones with SD slots 2024” into your favourite search engine.

Clouds work for you – great. They don’t for me.

Why ever not?

I’m not always somewhere with super fast 4 or 5G. I’m often – if not frequently – in places where 3G or even H can be patchy. In the olden days this wasn’t a problem as my phone was just for calling or texting, and I’d have an mp3 player for music. Recently we were in Czech for the May holidays, and we were in my wife’s car. She has a Macintosh telephone and Macintosh Music, and crossing a good chunk of Germany would have been mute if we didn’t have my phone because there’s not enough Internet pipes there to stream music.

Add to that there’s the fact that I hate subscription services. I was burned by photobucket and I’m still not prepared to let that happen again. Which it inevitably will, because capitalism and enshittification.

And have you seen the price difference of purely internal memory phones lately? Last I looked, you’d pay a semi-sensible price for the 512 GB version, then the 1TB version would be 2-300€ more expensive. The best 1TB SD card isn’t even half that much.

tl;dr – I don’t always have signal, and I resent any attempt to make me pay again for what I already have.

“The cloud is ok when you can get a signal. I want all of my music all the time”

This and it would help with phones that are short of onboard storage, like my old iPhone SE.

You might be low on data or travelling.

Plenty of times I’ve worked away and wanted to access media , without decent signal and unreliable WiFi.

Its not the reason the OP gave but its a good enough reason to find an SD slot useful in a phone.

Fair points all.  Different use cases, of course.

I don’t pay for cloud storage, I just use the cloud for account and data sync.  Photos and videos aren’t synced, instead they get periodically moved off the phone onto the desktop where I can then back them up.  (If you’re not copying elsewhere be that local or cloud then I hope there’s nothing in there that you care about.)

I don’t really have a great deal of locally stored music, I made a start on ripping my CDs and cassettes then got bored and paid for a Spotify subscription instead.  I have a ton of audiobooks / audio dramas (1420 files in 296 folders) totalling a whopping 124GB but I see no reason to have the lot on my phone at once, it’d take months to get through them all.

Roaming is largely included in my regular data package, certainly anywhere I’m likely to go, and my data allowance is something silly I’m unlikely to touch the sides of like 60GB.  Google Maps uses next to no data, the single biggest data user when I’m out on foot is probably Facebook.  I’m rarely out of range of some form of Wi-Fi when I stop moving.

Well I caved in and ending up getting her the S24 (sans SD card slot).  Thanks for your help again guys..

Saw a reddit post which had the idea of a phone case with a built in SD card reader / headphone jack etc for phones that don’t have these – seems a great idea in theory, and a couple of companies seemed to attempt this a few years back.. seems like a good idea, or am I missing something? Obviously no-one’s making them for a reason?

Obviously no-one’s making them for a reason?

Yeah, because most folk are using Cloud services and Bluetooth headphones.

Cloud storage space is very cheap I pay 1.79 a month for 100gb with google which also opens up extra picture editing options as well.

I agree, but even if a small percentage of phone owners would like these features, then this would still be a massive market?

There are perfectly legitimate reasons someone may want a phone with a SD card slot, and indeed to store photos or videos on it. I would back them up elsewhere though.

Sony make some excellent phones that fit the bill. They’ve been overlooked a bit in recent years but I wouldn’t count them out just because of Apple and Samsung domination. Other companies still make good alternatives, as good or better in some ways.

then this would still be a massive market

get yourself on Dragon’s Den then 😂 Although I think you might be overstating said demand. It doesn’t even make sense in the scenario presented in your OP to be honest. I mean I guess if I spend most of my time in the badlands of Germany with no phone signal I might want my entire music collection on my phone, although its internal storage is plenty big enough for thousands of hours worth of tunes/podcasts which would probably tide me over for a couple of weeks holiday 🤷‍♂️

but even if a small percentage of phone owners would like these features, then this would still be a massive market?

I think you’re simply overestimating the number of folk that would want such a thing. You’re adding bulk and weight to devices that are already quite large and there are so many different models of phones (constantly changing) that you’d be forever having to design new versions.

Sony make some excellent phones that fit the bill.

I was looking at a Sony in a shop window the other day.  Thought “oh, that’s quite nice” then saw the £1,299 price tag next to it.  That’s a wedge for something CEX will give you £40 for in three years time.

I agree, but even if a small percentage of phone owners would like these features, then this would still be a massive market?

There is almost certainly a market, I agree.  But the Venn diagram of “those who want a 3.5mm headphone jack” and “those who want the latest iPhone 37 Pro Ultra” is likely to be two discrete circles.

Wired headphones are going the way of wired TV remotes.  The next generation of kids won’t believe us.