This Hour in Nexus S: No microSD Card Slot, Samsung not the NFC Chip Provider, Best Buy Landing Page Live
It’s easy to get excited and overjoyed with all of the Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Nexus S news going out today, but we don’t want to flood our front page with it all. (And I’m sure you won’t want to see it all day, as well.) Here are but a few of the stories that have formed over the past hour regarding the Nexus S. Some as small as Best Buy’s landing site going live – something we figured would happen considering they’re an exclusive retailer in the states – and some as big as the confirmation that the phone won’t have a microSD card slot to expand storage.
In our list of things users and developers should know about the SDK, one of the changes highlighted talked about getting rid of the need for phones without a microSD card slot. “Ok that’s cool,” we thought as we imagined there would be scenarios where people couldn’t use microSD cards or they were quite fine with however much internal storage they have. But Google and Samsung really just needed a way to treat the 16GB of storage inside the Nexus S as an external microSD card because the phone sadly doesn’t support a REAL external microSD card slot. 16GB – while plentiful for some – just won’t cut it for others.
The beauty of having phones with expandable storage was the prospect of having as much as 32-48GB of storage for all of your pictures, music, videos, and whatever else you can think to cram into it. Sadly, this will not be the case if you opt for the Nexus S. That’s a big factor to consider when you’re at the point of sale December 16th.
Finally, through NXP’s announcement that the Nexus S features their NFC chip, we’ve ruled out Samsung supplying their own chip that they have produced (but have yet to mass produce.) It would have made a lot of sense for Samsung to be the vendor considering they manufacture the Nexus S, but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day: it all does the same thing.