I really hope some phones are released with support for MicroSD Express.
One of the practical reasons companies started removing MicroSD slots is because SD cards were far slower than the internal storage, and installing apps onto them could make everything laggier. That’s mostly solved with MicroSD Express which is up to 9x faster than the legacy MicroSD standard.
Of course, there’s also the financial aspect, which the manufacturers love. If you can’t insert an SD card, you have to pay the manufacturer for more storage.
Here’s hoping the EU mandates that phones need to support removable storage.










My wife upgraded from a Samsung S21 Ultra to an S25 Ultra but uses it mostly same way.
The one new feature I have seen her use is the AI person/object removal in the gallery. Samsung’s AI tools can run entirely on-device, which is nice (avoids sending the photos to the cloud and using an AI data center for the processing). I tried them while in airplane mode to confirm they do indeed work with no internet connection.
She upgraded because the old one had a pretty scratched screen (we installed a screen protector on the new one!) and the battery wasn’t lasting long any more. The official repair store that Samsung use in the US, UBreakIFix, don’t stock S21 batteries any more, and I didn’t trust myself enough to replace it myself.