Originally Posted by The Wizard:
“Secondly I'm not happy that there's no removable SD Card for several reasons. I don't use or wish to pay a fortune for cloud storage. I've already used up most of my 64gb micro SD as I store loads of movies and photos. Not only will it take forever to back up over 64gb of media to a cloud service but I will have to pay a fair bit for the storage capacity plus If anything happens to my phone I will have to download it all again, providing everything is backed up to date, if not I may end up losing some photos or video where it's far easier to remove the SD card and throw it into another handset. I have a lot of HD movies stored on my SD card which I need access to. No good it being stored on a cloud drive and not having enough space on my phone to download it.”
This is 2015. Fast home broadband, public Wifi hotspots and 4G mean we no longer need to store media files on our phones. I take a lot of photos and videos for work, but I don't need to store them on my phone. In fact my priority is to get them off my phone and made accessible to my other devices as quickly as possible. Every photo I take is uploaded automatically to my FREE cloud storage (approximately 82GBs spread across Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive) within seconds. Larger files can be held back until I have a WiFi connection so I don't drain my data allowance. If I do need more space then 100GB is just £1.30 a month and 1TB is £6.70.
I don't know anyone who needs to store loads of photos and movies on their phones but I guess there are some who do. On the odd occasion when I take a photo or video I deem good enough to share with people, I'll upload it Facebook or Youtube or email it. I don't need to keep it on my phone where only I can see it. Should I ever feel the need to watch an HD film on a 5" screen I can simply stream it from the cloud. But that's me; I accept that your circumstances may differ, but most of the people I know use their phones for temporary storage. Even if you do want to store files locally, 64GB (or even 32GB) is enough for several HD films, thousands of MP3s and more apps than you can shake a stick at.
Originally Posted by The Wizard:
“18 months ago my wife's phone completely died and I wasn't able to access the phone memory. Good job I could just remove the SD card and throw it in her new phone. No need to wait hours upon hours to download it all again. It was all there ready to go.
I'm about to buy a new 128gb card for my galaxy S4 as I've already used up most of the storage space. No good to me if I'm limited to internal storage only. I not only have photos and videos stored but documents and music as well as backups of all my aps. What good is all this on a cloud drive? I want it on my phone where I can get instant access to it.”
By using the cloud you could have access to all those files on not just your phone but your laptop, PC and tablet too. I have an Excel spreadsheet which I use to keep track of my current jobs. I can access it from any of my devices (and even from someone else's). I'm not 100% sure where it's actually stored; it's just 'there' on all my devices. Sure, cloud storage isn't always instant. An MP3 might take a few extra seconds to open or I may have to wait 10 seconds for a film to buffer but I can live with that.
Originally Posted by The Wizard:
“Another problem I'm facing is the fact I'm still using Windows XP which doesn't support MTP devices. My S2 uses Mass Storage Device so I can connect my phone and directly access the phone and external media. However when I try to connect my wife's S4 which doesn't support mass storage device only MTP, the folders appear blank so the only way I can copy stuff to and from her phone is by removing the SD card and copying directly to it via my laptop's card reader, by Bluetooth which is too slow for copying that much media like videos or via a wifi transfer software/app which again is quite slow.”
As much as I loved XP, even I have accepted that's it's a relic. I'm guessing you have a reason for sticking with it, perhaps some application that you like which has also been abandoned so it won't work on newer versions of Windows, but yours is an extraordinary case. You should probably look in to upgrading your WiFi too. An HD film shouldn't take more than a minute to transfer over an 802.11n network.
I for one will be getting an S6 in the next few weeks (as my S3 is too slow) and the 32GB version will be perfect for me. I'll have it configured for my cloud storage within a minute or two of switching it on. My Google apps will take a while to re-download but I can't imagine I'll be in any real hurry. I shouldn't be at all surprised if Samsung throw in another 50GB of Dropbox storage too.