Smart Phone Memory

99.999% of cell phones nowadays have cameras, and they all take pictures and videos.

A majority of smart phones do not have expandable memory, so you can't insert or take out a memory card.
These just use internal flash memory.

Let's say, the person does have a smart phone (you can research "smart phones with expandable memory" to get a model, or just skip it, say cell phone), and it has a expansion slot for insert/eject memory, the card would be a microSD card. (I'd just have them take the card out, on account that some phones you need to take off the battery cover to get the card out, some phones have a external spot).


I'm not entirely sure about this, but I think flash memory (in phones and about everything else) doesn't entirely delete the file because there is a electronic imprint left on the memory. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

When I want to get pictures off my iPhone, I have to plug it into the computer with an ISB cable. I can copy the pictures/video over, or I can move them, which deletes them off the phone. It's not like a digital camera, where there's a removable memory card that plugs into the computer for file transfer.

I'm really not sure if the smartphone's memory chip is removable. On a recent trip overseas, my husband had us take our old iPhones with us, and he replaced some part of the phone with a local (British) equivalent, so that our phones would work in the UK. I'm not entirely sure how that works, though. It may be a separate thing from the memory chip.

While iPhones do not have expandable memory, Most, but not all, android phones nowadays have an SD card slot for expandable memory.

Orianna2000 said:

I'm really not sure if the smartphone's memory chip is removable. On a recent trip overseas, my husband had us take our old iPhones with us, and he replaced some part of the phone with a local (British) equivalent, so that our phones would work in the UK. I'm not entirely sure how that works, though. It may be a separate thing from the memory chip.

Click to expand...

Your husband plugged in a new SIM card so that your phone would be compatible with the European networks.

iPhones don't have removable memory but many of the Android-based phones do (the Samsung Galaxy for example). As folks have mentioned, flash memory is used in a lot of these phones because it's cheap to use and doesn't lose data when you turn off power. As long as the data doesn't get overwritten then recovery programs can usually snoop what's on the card and can write out what's lurking there.

Yes, my Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Ace) has expandable memory as well as internal memory. Pictures I take with the camera are stored on a micro SD card, where there's way more room than the internal memory. I can pop that SD card out any time. I can get the pictures off the card without taking the card out by plugging the phone into my PC using a USB cable, where it mounts just like a flash drive. Or I can send them via email or upload them to various sites.

Sorry to be that guy, but...

Ya'll are talking about storage, not memory.

Most smartphones use a SoC, or System-on-a-Chip, which houses both the (typically) ARM processor and the memory.

A separate chip contains the NAND flash storage.

No smartphone has expandable memory, but plenty have expandable storage via microSD.

We could be more helpful if you could expand on what you mean by "ditch some data."

BDSEmpire said:

As folks have mentioned, flash memory is used in a lot of these phones because it's cheap to use and doesn't lose data when you turn off power.

Click to expand...

Flash storage is used because it won't get damaged and corrupted by physical shock and other sudden movements like a spinning platter will. Desirable in a mobile device.

And it's cheap because the NAND flash storage used in mobile devices is slow as fuck.

raelwv said:

For phones that take pictures and/or record video, what kind of memory do they use? Is it something removable like an SD card, or internal only?

Click to expand...

It may seem like an outrageous idea, but why don't you look up some smart phone statistics and choose one that meets your needs? Or walk into your local AT&T, Sprint or Verizon shop and ask?

Jeff

I don't know if this will help or not, but there is a reset feature on the iPhone. It clears the phone and settings so it takes it back to the factory settings. If you don't need to keep the data, that might be one way to "ditch" it.