Earlier, when Xiaomi announced the launch of the Xiaomi Mi 4i in Hong Kong, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi's Vice President of Global Marketing, further explained that external memory cards would become a thing of the past, similar to how removable batteries are increasingly being abandoned by smartphone manufacturers. He also detailed the key factors behind Xiaomi's adoption of this design. He also revealed that the company may plan to release a higher-capacity version of the Mi 4i in the future, depending on market demand.
According to reports from ePrice and Engadget, Xiaomi's Vice President of Global Marketing, Hugo Barra, further explained the main reasons for removing the external memory card slot when the Xiaomi Mi 4i was announced in Hong Kong. These reasons include the Xiaomi Mi 4i's thin and lightweight, all-in-one design, with even a small internal motherboard. Adding an external memory card module would inevitably affect the design of the body openings and thickness, while also further squeezing the battery capacity.
On the other hand, Hugo Barra also explained that while external memory cards may seem convenient, the market is flooded with counterfeit memory cards. Using these counterfeit cards can lead to slower data access and even data access errors, negatively impacting the user experience. Furthermore, with increasingly affordable memory products, more manufacturers are adopting internal memory as their primary storage device. This led Xiaomi to remove the external memory card feature from the Mi 4i.
Hugo Barra believes that the future trend will be to eliminate the need for external memory cards in mobile phones and instead use internal memory to store data. This will even allow for thinner and lighter phones and larger batteries. If the phone design still includes a micro SD card slot, it will be difficult to adjust the design to include a removable battery, thus preventing the phone from becoming thinner.
However, compared to Samsung's Galaxy S6 series, which eliminated the external memory card and battery swappable design but increased the built-in storage capacity to a maximum of 128GB, the Xiaomi Mi 4i only offers 16GB of storage, which seems insufficient for today's multimedia data and frequent photography. Hugo Barra did not elaborate on this, but only revealed that he would observe the actual market demand in the future and planned to further promote the high-capacity Xiaomi Mi 4i, but did not specify the expected launch time.
As for the decision to continue using the micro SIM specification in Xiaomi 4i, Hugo Barra said that the main consideration is that Asian markets such as India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan still mostly use the micro SIM specification, and only specific models such as iPhone, HTC One M8 and other models use the nano SIM specification, so this decision was made.
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