Hugo Barra gives reason why Xiaomi Mi 4i doesnt have microSD expansionWhen the world is moving to more memory smartphones, Xiaomi Mi 4i ships without expansion slot because Hugo Barra of Xiaomi is against it
Speaking to Engadget, Hugo clarified why his company dislikes microSD cards. First things first, Barra says SD cards impede the functions of a smartphone, “For high performance devices, we are fundamentally against an SD card slot.” says Barra. Xiaomi’s latest offering, the Mi 4i provides a second SIM slot instead of microSD card slot, because, Barra says microSD cards are “are incredibly prone to failure and malfunctioning of various different sorts.” He then gives a more definite answer by Xiaomi Mi 4i lacks external storage, “You think you’re buying like a Kingston or a SanDisk but you’re actually not, and they’re extremely poor quality, they’re slow, they sometimes just stop working, and it gives people huge number of issues, apps crashing all the time, users losing data, a lot of basically complaints and customer frustration. It’s gonna be a while before you finally accept that maybe the reason why it’s not performing is because you put in an SD card, right? You’re gonna blame the phone, you’re gonna blame the manufacturer, you’re gonna shout and scream and try to get it fixed, so many different ways until you say, ‘Actually, let me just take the SD card out and see what happens.’” Barra says that Xiaomi smartphones may remove external memory slots all together from future releases. “It is a trend: SD cards will disappear,” Barra stated “You should basically not expect SD card slots in any of our flagships.” Another important feature of the Xiaomi smartphones is they dont have removable batteries. Barra says its just for making the Xiaomi smartphones cost effective. “Our thinking is if you’re gonna have a removable back for the purposes of having an SD slot, you might as well make the battery removable,” Barra said. “It doesn’t really increase the cost of the battery that much.” Most new releases from big smartphone manufacturers like Samsung, Asus, Huawei and LG feature expanded slot for 128GB memory which may be increased in future if Samsung’s new chip, 3-bit NAND-based Embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) 5.0 storage is brought into use. Do you believe SanDisk and Kingston make bad quality microSD cards and do you believe microSD cards impede optimal functioning of smartphones. Most importantly, do you think Xiaomi Mi 4i is better better off without external memory. Do drop in your comments with your opinion.
