LG announced its gorgeous new flagship phone Sunday, the G5.
The device has all kinds of exciting, innovative features, from its attractive aluminum design, to its quirky "friends," to the modular battery slot at the bottom. But one of the most important ones that's flown under the radar is its embrace of adoptable storage.
Adoptable storage is a great new feature on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the latest version of Android. It lets you put a microSD card in your phone and treat its gigabytes as an expansion of the phone's built-in storage, instead of an extra, difficult-to-work-with space for photos and music. This lets you keep apps and other important data on your microSD card with zero effort, and effectively increases the value of the phone for a fraction of the cost of pricey phone upgrades.
Samsung's Galaxy S7 has a microSD slot, but the company disabled Marshmallow's adoptable storage feature, which means you can't store apps on it. You can only store files like photos and music.
A Samsung rep explained in an email that the company was concerned an adoptable storage option would prevent consumers from using mircoSD cards to transfer data between phones.
However, Android normally gives users the option of enabling and disabling the feature so it's not entirely clear why that would be a concern.
And of course Apple doesn't include a microSD card at all on its iPhones.
There was a lot of confusion over LG's storage options earlier this week. Ars Technica wrote, "The LG G5 and Galaxy S7 won’t support Android 6.0’s adoptable storage." Android Authority reported the same.
Samsung's people confirmed the S7 report. But LG public relations rep Monica Levy told Tech Insider that it wasn't true of the G5, writing, "Happy to inform you that LG’s newest flagship does support Android’s adoptable storage feature."
