I really have to wonder why 16GB is not enough storage for people. I view my storage as temporary... ...Why does everyone need more?
First off, you shouldn’t “really have to wonder” about something as simple as people that have preferences different than yours. If you really are that self-centered and unaware then your parents and grade school teachers failed you.
In any case, I’ll tell you why I like to have removable storage on my mobile devices.
When I travel for work (I’m a design engineer and I often have to travel to one of our plants to support the assembly line when new changes occur) I often have to spend a couple of nights in a town where the best option available when the assembly line shuts down at 2:30pm is to just go back to the hotel and wait until bedtime. As such, I tend to have a couple of different games (which can take up a lot of space on internal memory) on them. I also like to have at least a couple of albums of songs on the internal storage because some of the areas I go to are rather rural and streaming from the net isn’t always an option. When I travel I tend to make use of the camera a good bit for work too. I have a need to document things with still pictures as well as video. It isn’t uncommon for me to generate up to 3 GB of pictures and videos in a 3 day trip. In this case, 11 GB of storage can easily be filled very quickly.
As for external storage, I use that for movies and TV shows. Sometimes when I have to travel I get very little notice (fly out the next day) so I have one 32GB mSD card that I can pop into the HTPC. I set it up to batch-convert any queued up DVRed TV shows that I haven’t watched yet and let it convert about 10 or 12 hours worth of shows overnight. In the morning I pull the mSD card out of the computer and pop it into the tablet on my way out the door.
If I’m at a hotel that has a decent TV w/ HDMI hookup, I’ll swap the mSD and use the phone to playback shows on the hotel TV so I can use the tablet to surf the web while watching. If I’m in a motel where the ‘ol Zenith only has a composite in (or just an old scart connector,) I’ll use the tablet and watch the shows directly on that. So while a lot of my storage is also “temporary,” 11GB on the device doesn’t cut it.
I suppose a person could look to get a tablet and a phone with 64GB of internal storage, and just copy the shows to both, but that isn’t an option that is economically viable, even if a couple of Nexus devices were offered with those capacities. In addition, I don’t have time in the morning to wait for two devices to copy 25 or so GB of video data either.
If you’re use case is basically a phone that is used to text your friends, yeah 16GB of total internal storage looks like plenty. But not everyone has the same use as you.
-Suntan
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And let us not forget, Google promotes "cloud use" so a card slot is not a priority to them.
When's the last time you tried to rely on Google's cloud in the middle of rural Nebraska? Or worse, rural areas outside of Prague, Czech Republic or Warsaw, Poland?
Clouds are great for Google, not so good for you when you travel to areas that are completely sunny.
-Suntan