Downgraded to get expandable storage and it's gone!

[egracenoonan]

I've had my Note 20 Ultra for 5 years now. After the S9, then this phone, I thought I would be a loyal customer. Then Samsung started removing more and more things, right to the expandable storage.

I looked, and the A phones still had it. But in the time it took me to get an order in, it was gone. I just got an A35 delivered, and ...nothing.

Samsung, please start bringing back expandable storage. I worked too long in Technology to trust any cloud service. Hacks, selling data.... 

[Mujibar]

Expandable storage exists in the form of flash drives and external drives (both HDD and SSD). Plus, they have much faster write speeds than SD cards.

[realaud]

The original reason for the SD card slots, is that phones came with minimal HDD space initially - half of which was taken up by the operating system.  One also used to be able to format said SD cards to be an extension of the HDD.  As phones got more advanced and HDD storage capacity became cheaper, the phones with larger base storage capacity eliminated the SD slot in favor of other features.  As @Mujibar said, you can still use a USB flash drive. They even make some small enough to remain attached, but these days, most people just use the external drives to offload photos and other data, with no need to keep the drive attached.

[realaud]

Are you sure the SD slot is gone?  A series phones have a dual sim tray - either side by side or over/under.  The A35 has the reversible tray. One side takes the SIM and the other side takes the SD card or a second physical SIM.  Look closely at both sides and the outline for the Micro SD.  Here's a video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y3rf1cZIi8&t=107s 

[egracenoonan]

Thank you all, but no, there is no place for a micro SD. The holder has been changed. I looked carefully and it no longer has the "sd", plus, I tried, and the shape is just wrong.

They only recently changed this. Go look at the specs now.

grrrrrr....sigh

[realaud]

All A series have an SD tray. And if yours does not, did you actually read the specs before you purchased?

[egracenoonan]

Yes. When I ordered the phone, the description clearly stated it accepted a micro sd. By the time it arrived, the software no longer "saw" the SD, AND the description had changed.

Yes it came with the dual holder, and yes it said "sim 2" and "micro sd", but the software doesn't recognize it.

So, I bought an A55.

[jumphour]

My A35, US unlocked, has a microSD spot in the SIM tray. I'm glad I bought it, because the A36 doesn't have one. I have a Samsung 512GB card in mine, loaded with music & movies.

[realaud]

It does accept a micro SD. The SIM tray is dual sided and will accept one physical sim on one side and one physical SIM OR SD card on the other. So you can use a physical SIM and an eSIM plus an SD card or two physical SIMs and no SD card