Originally Posted by
Kevin O'Quinn "We" actually don't know the cost of adding the sd card slot. If you want NTFS support, there's a licensing fee for that. I would be curious to know how much engineering time/energy is put in to making sure it functions the way it's expected to as well.
Either way, now that official support is back in Android manufacturers have decided that cost/benefit is good enough to put resources in to including one. Considering Moto released a version of the G that has a slot, odds are good that this new X will have one as well.
FAT32 + VFAT has a licensing fee as well if you are producing and selling a device that supports the file system (it's free to use in software). Unless you're using ext4 (which has poor support in Windows and Mac OS, so would not be ideal for a non-MTP device) you're going to be paying
something to include sdcard support.
That said, the licensing fee for FAT32 is $0.25 per device sold, so I don't think it would be a major factory.