Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Smartphone memory question

Sep 8, 2016 11:27AM PDT

I'm one of sixteen people left in this world who doesn't own a smartphone......yet! I'm about to take the plunge and would appreciate a little help in learning about smartphone memory.

Essentially, I'd like to know if there's any difference in internal memory vs. added card memory. In other words, and as a "for instance", is there any difference in performance between a phone that comes with 16GB internal memory and a phone that comes with an 8GB internal memory and has an additional 8GB memory card installed for a total of 16GB?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
It's almost like what we get on a Windows PC but worse.
Sep 8, 2016 11:40AM PDT

You can find thousands of discussions about this so I'll keep it simple. It is NOT as if your phone can use that as part of the internal space. It could be used for photos, videos and sometimes for apps. It's not seamless and for the reason that it's all over the web, I will keep this short.

I have to guess you are talking about an Android phone. You did well to skip those phones under 8GB. My bare minimum for Android is 1GB RAM and 8GB internal storage. But with 88 buck phones having 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage I can't see why we would go with less than that (see the Bluboo Picasso on Amazon.)

- Collapse -
Thanks for the info
Sep 8, 2016 4:49PM PDT

You were correct in assuming that my prospective purchase was an android. Actually, as of a couple hours ago, the purchase was concluded online on a Motorola (Now Lenovo) Moto G4+. It's the latest edition of the Moto G series and I'm looking forward to a rather steep learning curve.

Ironically, since I originally posted my question, I surprisingly learned that there was an effort made with the new G4 features to attempt to make the relationship between internal and card memories more seamless, but the writer of the article I read seems to think that while their efforts made an improvement, the best bet is still to get larger internal memory models, and that added card memory is still recognizably slower than internal memory.

So the answer to my question is, "No, 8GB of internal memory plus 8GB card memory do not equal 16GB of internal memory.

- Collapse -
It's an area
Sep 8, 2016 5:07PM PDT

That Google needs to make it "just work."

While I write apps and more, even I shake my head at times on this one. Too geeky.