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I think the reason why we have smaller memory cards is because we NEED them. One of my students just bought a new UMTS (3G) phone that supports video conferencing, watching TV and God knows what else. Naturally, this phone needs more memory than older phone models. It is the first time I have ever seen a TF card in use, and I still can't believe how small it is, about half the size of the SIM card!!!(I could not help taking pictures, that's how awed I was.) A bigger memory card would never fit in that phone. The reason it is underneath the phone is probably so that you don't loose it by accident - if you have to first remove the battery, you will definitely pay attention by the time you finally get to the card.
It came, however, with a TF-to-MMC adapter, which shows that even though the industry would like us to only take out the card once or twice during the phone's lifetime, users have different needs. The first smartphones were cool but horribly limited - with BT about the only means to transfer media from one device to another without expensive MMS costs. (And as far as I know you can't even send MP3s, WAVs, MIDIs and such by MMS - but not that I ever tried, and I may be wrong there.) Bluetooth is fine but tediously slow if you are transfering a long video.
Being able to take the card out for data transfer gives you extra freedom: You can take out the card and stick it into one of those picture printing machines we have in every store nowadays - no need to send anything to an email address first, and no need to pay expensive MMS fees.
You can upload movies and MP3s to it right away. Maybe there is a cultural difference - but who does not have at least an external 6/7/8/whatever-in-one card reader in Germany nowadays. They sell them even in grocery stores. Digital cameras have long replaced analog cameras - so we are used to using removable memory cards. We like them, and we need them. No matter how small, we want to touch them and hold them and.. OK, it's getting weird now. :mrgreen:
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