64GB phones aren’t big enough for me anymore

With leaked photos of the Galaxy S9 emerging last week, we’re fast approaching the 2018 season of new phone launches and the annual cycle of companies trying to convince us we’re in desperate need of an upgrade. Typically, there’s a fair amount of hot air inflating the importance of the latest spec, but this year, I’m actually starting to feel the real need for something more. I’m talking about storage.

No doubt the star attraction on any 2018 spec sheet will be the shiny, latest-generation processor powering the device. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 and Samsung’s Exynos 9 both come with a slew of promises for major improvements and efficiency gains, with the former offering 4K HDR video recording at 60fps and the latter opting for a higher frame rate with 120fps 4K video. I’m confident that phones will be able to shoot awesome 4K footage this year, but I’m less sure that we’ll have the space to fit it all.

My own use of storage on my phone has been gradually growing over time. Every year, I seem to be shooting more and more photos, and I’m now increasingly experimenting with video as well. But 4K video is rather mismatched with my Pixel 2 XL with 64GB of space. One 54-second 4K clip adds up to 270MB, consuming 5MB per second, which means I’d need 6GB of space for a 20-minute recording. If you get a Galaxy S9 this year and quadruple the frame rate to 120fps with the Exynos 9 chip, you’d be looking at a 24GB file for the same video with the same level of compression. The quality of what we’re producing with our phones is undoubtedly improving, but that’s also weighing these devices down.

Between the 9.7GB consumed by the Android OS, 5.7GB for my other apps, 2GB for games, and 24GB for my old-school MP3 music collection, I’ve already used up two-thirds of my device’s storage before even turning on the camera. I know many will argue streaming services are the solution, but I’m not always connected to the internet, and when I start saving albums for offline use it’s essentially the same thing as loading up my own MP3s. That’s quite aside from the fact that USB Audio Player Pro is, in my judgment, the best way to listen to music on Android.

Google and Apple both offer options for offloading your photos and video to the cloud and thus freeing up space on your device. Should you opt for one of Google’s Pixels, that cloud storage is free, which makes it a decent workaround for not having the option to expand the device’s internal storage. And yet, I still prefer to have my photos and videos on the phone itself. One reason is to have an extra copy as a backup, and the other is that I’m still not constantly connected to the internet and it’d be nice to be able to show off my Pixel photography to other people on the tube or on a flight.

I may be an edge case, but I’m sure Netflix downloaders and podcast addicts have bumped up against similar constraints, even on 64GB devices that we used to consider generous on the storage front. Beside better cameras, we now have a litany of better sources for higher-quality content, and they all add up in the end. Those new processors we expect to see in 2018 will bring with them substantial improvements for augmented and virtual reality applications, and each new AR or VR app will need a chunk of space of its own. If you’re buying the latest and most potent processor on the market, you owe it to yourself to combine that with 128GB of storage (or even more) these days. You won’t run out of ways to use that extra space.

The overriding trend with phones every year is to keep adding more power — both in terms of processing capability and battery size — and to then think up useful and / or entertaining ways to harness that power. Storage has operated on a different track to the rest of a phone’s specs: it’s pretty much the only thing you’re allowed to customize (and overpay for, if you’re buying an iPhone), and it’s tended to increase much more slowly.

Every year it feels like phone manufacturers are trying to force-feed us hot new specs, but I think in 2018 I’ll be especially keen to maximize the storage on my next phone before I start using it in earnest. It might not be the sexiest spec in the world, but it’s one that just makes life much easier when it’s maxed out. Samsung, LG, and HTC have been especially good about this by providing microSD expansion on their recent flagships, allowing more intensive users the freedom to grow beyond the phone they initially purchased. Maybe that will be the unexpected hot trend of 2018: microSD slots coming back into fashion as we all realize we’re going to need a little more space.