While Apple might still persist with fixed storage in phones and tablets, those of you with Android and Windows devices can happily upgrade storage, and now you can hit almost as high as it gets.
When it comes to buying a phone or tablet, 256GB options are rare. Take the iPhone range which maxes out at 128GB of storage.
Over on the iPad side of things, only one variant of Apple’s tablet is getting 256GB of storage, and that’s the iPad Pro 9.7 inch model, due to be released this week.
If Apple doesn’t dabble much in spaces over 200GB, few phone and tablet makers will, and that’s one of the reasons why you don’t see these storage choices in smartphones and tablets.
But another reason why you might not comes from the ability to upgrade. Specifically, if you have an Android phone or tablet, or a device sporting a microSD card slot and an operating system that has no problem with upgrades — say Windows — you can get more storage yourself with a memory card upgrade.
To do this, you do, of course, need a memory card, but this week Lexar has announced a memory card that makes an upgrade of 200GB to any supported device quite easy.
Provided you’ve bought the phone or tablet within the past year or two (and it supports microSDXC), you should be good with Lexar’s 200GB 633x card being able to deliver a boost of 200GB to a phone or tablet, handy for photos, videos, music, and any other file you’re keen to move from the main storage to something bigger.
Phones and tablets aren’t the only thing to benefit, with cameras also able to take advantage of 200GB, particularly action cameras that tend to rely on the smaller microSD size. Speed is also critical on these devices, providing what we suspect will be up to 45MB per second write speeds (roughly half of the up to 95MB per second read speed, and on par with Lexar’s other 633x cards), helpful if you happen to be capturing video.
“Professional and everyday photographers are now more passionate about shooting high-quality video, on everything from digital SLRs to sports and aerial cameras,” said Mathew Luu, Marketing Manager for Micron Consumer Products Group in the Asia-Pacific region.
“With the Lexar 200GB microSDXC UHS-I card, photographers can continue to capture and store large amounts of content on the go, without having to worry about running out of space.”
Photographers and mobile owners, actually, with Lexar suggesting as many as 33,000 photos could be stored on the card or around 28,000 songs.
As for how much this upgrade will cost, Australians will find it in electronics and computer stores that typically sell Lexar for a recommended price of $194.95, roughly making it a little under dollar per gigabyte to upgrade.
