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Still no card slot | 255 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Still no card slot - Yeah thinking of getting the 32MB
Authored by: SilverWave on Sunday, November 04 2012 @ 12:06 PM EST
16 is nice but....

---
RMS: The 4 Freedoms
0 run the program for any purpose
1 study the source code and change it
2 make copies and distribute them
3 publish modified versions

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Still no card slot
Authored by: kuroshima on Sunday, November 04 2012 @ 01:01 PM EST
It may be because in my country, my MVNO allows tethering,
so I have absolutely no desire on having to pay for a
second contract, but I never undertsood people wanting to
have cellular connection on a tablet, unless it's for remote
administration (read "enterprise friendly feature").

As for the lack of SD card, yeah, it's a PITA.
Unfortunately, for historical reasons, Android mounts it's
internal, user accessible memory as /sdcard, so even if the
device doesn't have an SD card, apps know where to find the
place to store their secondary data (Think resources for
games, cache for browsers, temporary files, etc etc. apps
are installed and store their private information in user
inaccessible areas of the disk, so unless you are rooted,
you won't see where the actual apps are installed or where
they keep their databases). How do you add a secondary SD
card, and yet keep compatibility with installed
applications? The original issue comes from a kludge, and
OEMs have implemented their own kludges. Samsung mounts the
external SD card under /sdcard/external_sd. Asus puts
mountable storage under /removable/<drive name>. There is no
standard. This means that apps will still need to use
(unless the app creator hand-codes the secondary locations,
or unless they offer you a dialog to select the location of
your secondary storage) the internal storage for all their
functions. Another issue is that if the app expects the
secondary storage to be present (because it needs the
resources to display properly), and the card is removed,
then we've got a big problem, as the app will not work
properly. SD cards as "internal memory" were there because
it was too expensive to offer decent sized storage in the
early days of Android. They usually were not easily accessible, as they often
were under the
battery cover and
removing them usually required to switch off the phone.
Nowadays, SD cards are mainly used for media
(movies/music/etc), and once you have 8 GBs or more of
internal storage, you don't really need them for anything
else (unless you install some of the absolutely humongous
games that are now available on the Play Store, such as
Bard's Tale, that take 3.5 GBs all by themselves. Still, you
usually aren't simultaneously playing multiple games, so you
don't actually need more than 16 GBs). For music, you still
have enough space, unless you go for lossless codecs such as
FLAC (and then again the built in speakers and audio jack
don't justify such qualities). Plus, you're not using a 10"
tablet as a portable music player, right?
Documents and ebooks take negligible space, at the sizes
we're speaking about, and should probably be in the internal
storage anyway.
This leaves video. Full HD movies (to take advantage of the
gorgeous screen) can easily take 1+ GBs/hour of duration. It
would be nice to be able to carry your Blueray Disk
collection, ripped and de-drm-ed on your tablet (for those
of us who live in places were such a thing is legal), or
your favorite TV series recorded with your DVR, but I
question the utility of using the tablet as permanent
storage for them. With the 16 GB model, you can still have 4-5 hours of content,
and even
with a 8 GB model (such as the original Nexus 7 or the Nexus 4, in their lower
capacity
versions) you can easily hold 1-2 hours, as long as you accept that you can't
also have huge
games installed*. What google has not done is properly
support removable storage connected via USB on the go
(probably because it doesn't want to open that can of worms,
and force OEMs to leave behind their kludges and standardize
the mount points) on their nexus devices. There is an app
that allows streaming media from a USB on the go connected
USB mass storage drive, but it is read only. If you root
your device, you can install an app that will mount the
connected storage anywhere you want it.

There is also the power aspect. SD card readers draw power.
It may be not much power, but batteries for portable devices
are constrained enough already.

I personally don't agree with not putting SD cards in the
devices, but with multiple ways to get data into and out of
the device (cable/bluetooth/wifi direct/any number of
additional apps that work on WiFi, such as the ones that
create an FTP server on the device), I don't really feel
they're necessary any more.

*pro-tip: secondary storage for apps is usually located (for apps that respect
the
guidelines that Google proposes) under /sdcard/android/data/<package_name>
and
/sdcard/android/obb/<package_name>. If you need to make space in a
"hurry", but don't want
to uninstall anything, just go there with your chosen file manager app and
delete the
information on some app that you're not currently using, as the app should
redownload it
again when opened, if necessary. In fact, if you just want to move in a movie/TV

show/whatever, you can backup it first, and when you've finished watching that
movie/tv
show/whatever, simply copy it back in.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Meaning no exFAT licensing from Microsoft
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 04 2012 @ 02:16 PM EST
Most anything with an SD card slot will require a license
from Microsoft for exFAT, at which point they will try to
get their grubby little fingers on money to license their
entire patent portfolio under vague threats of infringement
which will need a lawsuit to uncover.

Extra expandable storage is nice, but the MS tithe is not
nice.

Of course they will sue regardless, but it's one less thing
to license. I wonder if they'd even agree to license it
without a general portfolio license (to spread FUD)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Still no card slot - you can use USB
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 04 2012 @ 02:41 PM EST

The USB in the Nexus supports USB host mode. That means you can get an add on card reader connected. You need to take ownership of the tablet ("root" it) and install an extra app from play store, but then it should be trivial.

Obviously this isn't quite as convenient when travelling as having the card built in; on the other hand it's much more flexible because it means other devices such as cameras and so on are also supported by the Nexus.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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