I love large-screen phones, and to make do until the Galaxy Note 5 comes along, I recently bought the LG G4 as the 5.1-inch display on the Galaxy S6 edge wasn't cutting it for me. The G4 supports expandable storage, and since it only has 32GB of on-board storage, I popped in my 64GB class 10 microSD card on the device and started using it alongside the S6 edge.
I've been using the cameras on both the Galaxy S6 edge and the LG G4 intensively, and on the G4, I noticed a strange and frankly irritating issue. I set the camera to save photos on the microSD card, and right from the get go, I noticed that some photos were getting all garbled up on the G4. Their thumbnails would show up fine, and so would the image when I opened it; a second later though, big grey boxes would start to show up all over the photo. I saw this with around one in every 20 images, but it did manage to ruin some photos that I initially thought had come out great.
I realized that the issue could be because of my microSD card, and I was right – switching to the internal storage for saving photos got rid of the image corruption. Now, there's no telling if there is an issue with my card or with the phone itself, but it sure did make me realize how Samsung might have been right to have done away with the microSD slot on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge. Expandable storage will remain an important feature until we can throw in a lot of internal storage on smartphones, but my experience with the microSD card on the LG G4 was something of an eye-opener.
Those who advocate against microSD cards often point out that you can never be sure how long a microSD card will last, and whether we like it or not, it's indeed an important factor. Of course, for most users SD cards last longer than they would need, but when it comes to flagship smartphones, perhaps it is a good thing that Samsung, Apple or Google are only offering built-in storage. At this point, I'm wondering if I should buy a new card for the G4 or just make do with the 32GB of internal storage, a conundrum I would not be in if LG had decided to offer a variant that comes with 64GB of storage out of the box.
In fact, it would be great if every smartphone manufacturer starts making base models of its flagships with 64GB of inbuilt storage, but that's a dream that probably won't come true for a couple of years.
