Today has been deemed the LG G5 day by none other than LG, and with that sort of declaration will always come plenty of positives and negatives. LG’s G5 uses the latest in mobile processing technology in the form of the Snapdragon 820, plenty of RAM and all the rest of the specs you have come to expect from a flagship smartphone. In addition to this is a brand new and revolutionary modular design that allows the user to pop the bottom out of the unit and exchange it with a number of different modules such as a higher quality audio DAC, dedicated camera buttons, extra batteries and more.
Part of this modular design also includes a microSD card slot, which LG has been known for using in pretty much all their phones. While the unfortunate trend of removing microSD card slots has been pervasive in the mobile world for the last few years, LG has stuck to their guns here and are still including it. Interestingly enough Google, who has shunned microSD card slots in Nexus phones practically forever now, included a new feature in Android 6.0 Marshmallow called Adoptable Storage. This feature takes an inserted microSD card and essentially converts it to internal storage, formatting it in the same way the internal storage is, so that your actual usable storage is increased, not just your media storage.
The downside to this functionality is that it’s incredibly difficult to actually remove the microSD card without completely messing things up, something that more or less defeats the main purpose of having one in the first place. While making microSD card usage as seamless to users as possible in Marshmallow is nice, LG didn’t see this as a positive for customers and is omitting it from the new G5. That means manual storage of photos, videos and apps will need to be performed instead of the automatic features Google built into Marshmallow, but it also means that you can easily swap out microSD cards without having to worry about torching your brand new phone. Sure this is unfortunate for some, but there’s likely an equal number of people that this will benefit too.