If you can’t get enough of smartphone games, videos, photos, and music, then check out these best Android phones with expandable memory in 2017. Sorry iPhone fanboys/fangirls, Apple never thought of giving an option to expand your memory unless that meant buying a new model.
Memory wasn’t so significant when phones didn’t have cameras or mp3 support and other audio files. There were monophony and polyphony melodies, but they would get annoying pretty quickly. I think my first phone with support for videos, music and higher qualities photos was Sony Ericsson K510i. It had about 30MB of internal memory, so memory card was a life saver. I continued to upgrade the memory of my phones with memory cards until a few years ago when I got a phone with 32GB of storage and didn’t need any. Yes, I have tons of music, apps, photos, videos and honestly, I never check out my storage space. Probably the smartphone manufacturers saw there were plenty of users like me and cut the memory card slots out of their phones for good in the past couple of years. Samsung made that thing when they removed the memory card slot from Samsung S6. Some of the big manufacturers like Huawei, LG, ZTE, and Xiaomi also opted for this. The decision wasn’t received warmly by the smartphone users, and now almost all major smartphone manufacturers are bringing the memory card slot back. Besides Apple of course, who stubbornly declines to give that option for their users because of their business model.
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Having a smartphone without memory card slot gives the manufacturer ability to sell identical smartphones with bigger storage for a larger price. For example, iPhone 7 with 32GB of storage costs around $649.99, one with 128GB costs $100 more and the model with 256GB will cost you even $200 more. To put things into perspective, microSD card with a capacity of 128GB costs around $50. Other manufacturers also have models with different storage capacity, but the majority of models give you an option to insert a memory card. Latest smartphones (2016 and 2017) mostly support up to 256GB memory cards. Having a smartphone with high internal storage capacity has many perks. The smartphone reads content much faster from internal than external memory. That shouldn’t be an issue for long since memory cards with high-speed are becoming increasingly approachable regarding price. For those of you who are interested only in smartphones with a great camera, we recommend you to check out our list of 7 Best Smartphones with the Best Cameras in 2017.
Before we get to our list, there is one thing you should be familiar with. Nowadays you’ll see lots of smartphones with Dual SIM capability alongside support for memory cards. One would think you can use all those options at the same time. Well, that isn’t quite true. You’ll rarely come across a smartphone that has two SIM slots and a memory card slot on top. Usually, you’ll get one SIM slot and one SIM/ Memory Card slot. If you use the second slot for a SIM card, one of them will always have to be on standby, meaning it is slightly better than switching your SIM cards manually. If you use the second slot for a memory card, forget about Dual SIM.
Let’s talk now about making our list of best Android phones with expandable memory in 2017. We decided to pay attention to models that were released this year since that is most likely what you are looking for. We used GSM Arena‘s search and selected smartphones released in 2017 that have expandable memory, have display resolution FHD (1080 x 1920) or higher, pack octa–core processors, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage and higher, and that have at least 12MP rear and 5MP front cameras. Then we gave them points according to their specifications and combined everything into our IM score. Note that some entries on the list may not be available officially in the United States, so you’ll have to seek to get them from China online. Let’s look at the list then.
