Ip68 is important. I went with xperia 10, and am positively surprised. Fits all the checkboxes and less undesired software than google. I don't have the mandatory search bar in the front screen!
For whatever reason, Xperia phones are given the cold shoulder in these discussions. I secretly wish everyone who has complained about headphone jack/card slot/hole punch/screen size would buy one, and then limit their complaining to only whatever remains that an Xperia phone doesn't provide.
I just cracked the screen on my Pixel 5a yesterday and ordered an Xperia 10 IV this morning to replace it thanks to this thread. I've owned an Xperia Z3 Compact and Z5 Compact previously and was quite happy with them. In fact the Z5C still does bicycle computer duty today. I paid all of $340 for the (brand new) Xperia 10 IV. Not sure how that's not a competitive price for the features and quality you get.
Might be worth having a look at Sony if you want to spend more money for whatever reason. Latest Xperia 1 and 5 both have 3.5mm jacks and SD card slots. There is some preinstalled software (camera apps, Google apps, probably FaceBook) but overall not too-too bad.
Fairphone has a microSD card on their phone. At least there is one slot for a microSD card on my FP2 and FP4.
Source: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4 under specification/storage -> unfold the block "Storage" and under the main storage is : External storage capacity: microSD up to 2TB (SD 3.0)
Because tech companies are about to fill your storage with un-uninstallable bloat.
Built-in storage is the next limitation, if you get past holding your huge-screen no-grip phone securely (like with a pop holder) and the battery that degrades exponentially f(time).
The newer microSD cards are quite fast. Not as fast as built-in storage but fast enough for things like photos and videos if you buy a card with the appropriate speed class. V30 512 GB costs about 40€ including VAT here in Germany.
SD cards are made for cameras etc, and they're good for that. They have sequential RW speeds to match common video formats at 1X speed or burst photo capture. The spec sheets won't tell you how terrible the random write speed is, and even the quoted sequential speeds aren't very good, but that's ok for cameras.
I use a modern high-end SD card from SanDisk as semi-permanent storage in my MBP. If I copy anything to that card that's not a single file, it takes forever. Overall it feels worse than using an old HDD. I have to actually think about what I store on it (mostly videos/photos), so I totally see the reason for wanting more internal storage instead of an SD slot.
That's only sequential write speed. Of course the camera features on a phone will have no problem using an SD card, but other stuff dealing with more random writes to things like SQLite stores (common for phone apps) or directory trees might. Like I said, I've only used an SD card on my Mac, and it was a bad experience, so I'm guessing a bit about phone usage.
With a decent filesystem and a ram buffer the better microsd cards still beat an old 5400rpm 128GB HDD's sequential speed when doing random writes of ~500kB files by a fair margin.
150MB/s is nowhere near SSD speed, but it would saturate a SATA I port.
I'm not sure about that test cause there are too many variables, but in the typical real-world usage of like cloning a git code repo onto my SD card or opening a zip file, it was always painfully slow. I wasn't even benchmarking, I was just trying to get stuff done and not wanting to wait on it. In fact I moved the files to an HDD to do it one time.
Considering 100 GB HDD's came out 20+ years ago that's not very suprising. If people are comparing SD cards to HDD's they're probably comparing to HDD's made in the last 10 years.
OP specifically cited an old hdd in the pre-ssd days. New HDDs are still at best on par with a high end microsd used as internal storage (compare an A2 microsd 'rated' at 2000 but actually getting about 800 iops vs a high end hdd benchmarking at 200-300).
Mounting without a buffer on a badly chosen filesystem in what could well be the M1's abysmally slow sd reader isn't a representative test.
Hare braned formatting tools will also often offset the filesystem by 512 Bytes (necessitating two writes and two reads for one 4k write) or use blocks that aren't 4kiB
FWIW my MacBook Pro is the 2015 Intel version, and my card is HFS+ formatted (Android would use FAT32 or Ext4). I got similar performance with an external USB reader IIRC, but maybe it's time to test again.
USB 2 has very poor latency for this use case and the sd connector lacks the pins for newer sd cards.
A usb 3 UHS III reader would be able to talk to the card at full speed, then it's a matter of convincing the OS to trim it and buffer as if it's an internal hdd. Kinda expensive and pointless to go to that effort to get 2x hdd performance when there are NVME enclosures for cheaper SSDs that have 100x the IOPs though.
- no headphone jack
- no SD card slot
- all come with ad-ware and un-uninstallable third-party apps like Facebook (except for Google Pixels, which don't satisfy the first two criteria)
Mid range is where it's at. Why pay $200 more for 256 instead of 128 GB when I can put in my 1,000 GB mircoSD card?
It's a shame that Fairphone went with the no SD card trend. I would have really liked to buy their phone...