{"id":334,"date":"2025-09-30T10:55:27","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T09:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/?p=334"},"modified":"2025-09-29T11:50:53","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T10:50:53","slug":"android-phones-with-expandable-storage-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/2025\/09\/30\/android-phones-with-expandable-storage-in-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Android phones with expandable storage in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>As far as I&#8217;m aware there has never been an Apple product that runs iOS that has had expandable storage. Apple realised that by fixing the storage amount, they could make a lot of money by selling versions of their devices with more storage built in. Even with the original iPhone which released in 2007, there was a 4GB model and an 8GB model, with a \u00a3100 difference in price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In contrast a Micro SD slot in an Android phone was almost a given up until around 2020. Using Samsung as a reference point the Note 9 was the last &#8220;Note&#8221; device to have an SD slot, and the S20 was the last &#8220;S series&#8221; device to have one. Just as Samsung copied Apple when they removed the headphone jack in an effort to sell wireless earbuds, they eventually stopped offering a Micro SD slot to push buyers into more expensive models with higher storage. Pixel&#8217;s have never offered expandable storage, pushing buyers towards their &#8220;Google drive&#8221; cloud storage instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Excuses are made by manufacturers that SD cards are slow, SD cards are insecure, they&#8217;re unreliable etc etc. None of these points are false, but it doesn&#8217;t justify not giving us the option. For me a Micro SD card is a perfect solution. I don&#8217;t need fast storage, I keep photos, videos and music on it so I don&#8217;t need blazing fast read and write speeds. It doesn&#8217;t need to be secure for me, it&#8217;s holiday pictures and music&#8230; The portability saves me a lot of time, rather than having to wait for all this data to transfer I can simply swap the SD card into a different device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fortunately there are still some new smartphones being released that still have a Micro SD card. I&#8217;ll list below in groups of brands, devices released this year that have one. Note I&#8217;ll only include phones in this list that are readily available in the UK. If you&#8217;re in the market for one, hopefully this can help steer your purchase:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Fairphone Gen 6 &#8211; \u00a3499<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>All Motorola Moto G range. Pricing from \u00a379.99 &#8211; \u00a3299.99. Moto Edge 60 &#8211; \u00a3349.99<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro &#8211; \u00a3219<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Oneplus Nord CE5 &#8211; \u00a3249<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Samsung A17 &#8211; \u00a3169, Samsung A26 &#8211; \u00a3299<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Sony Xperia 10 VII &#8211; \u00a3399, Xperia 1 VII \u00a31399<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s immediately apparent that we haven&#8217;t got many choices here, especially if we were looking for a premium offering. This is now a feature aside condemned to the budget market segment, where getting the customer is more important than how much they spend, aside from the Fairphone 6 and Xperia 1 VII which are niche devices anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For me I would be avoiding the cheapest devices on this list, those with dated chipsets and 4GB RAM are going to cause more frustration than they&#8217;re worth. Some of the higher end Moto G range are good, as is the CMF 2. However, if I were paying full retail price and had to choose one phone with a Micro SD slot I think it would have to be the Oneplus Nord CE5. It&#8217;s spec sheet way surpasses the other devices on this list bar the \u00a31399 Xperia, and also has a fairly substantial update promise (4 OS, 6 Security).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would be purchasing now with the intent to keep the device for a long period of time, so choose one with a good update promise, over the next couple of years Micro SD slots will become more and more scarce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As far as I&#8217;m aware there has never been an Apple product that runs iOS that has had expandable storage. Apple realised that by fixing the storage amount, they could make a lot of money by selling versions of their devices with more storage built in. Even with the original iPhone which released in 2007, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sm1th.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}