SD Cards will Disappear Says Xiaomi

The world’s 3rd largest smartphone distributor, Xiaomi recently launched a budget friendly smartphone, Mi4i in India. Unlike its offerings in that segment, this one didn’t sport a removable SD card slot for storage expansion. This step can be seen in most flagship devices’ case. Xiaomi’s VP Hugo Barra came on record to clarify the speculations. In an interview, he made it clear that they are fundamentally against an SD card slot in high performance devices like Mi3, Mi4, Mi4i and Mi Note lineups. They did not want to sacrifice the area covered by SD card slot in a device. It can be used for other important components like increasing battery capacity, another Micro SIM slot, appearance and ergonomics and that is how Mi4i with 5″ display carries 3150 mAh battery. SD cards are also “incredibly prone to failure and malfunctioning of various different sorts”. These memory storage cards are slow, unreliable and when crashes cause OS corruption, Data loss.

“It is a trend: SD cards will disappear,” Barra added. “You should basically not expect SD card slots in any of our flagships.” Hugo said. Devices like Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge doesn’t support removable SD Card storage. Samsung did incredible job by replacing standard eMMC 5.0 by UFS 2.0 storage which boast ‘Command Queue’ tech used in SSDs. That is how it blows away the competition.

This is a good step, but it will take time for consumers to accept. What do you think about it? Let us know in the comment section.

Thank you Engadget for providing us with this information.