Nokia’s New Lumia 920 Misses Out on SD Card Slot to Avoid ‘Defiling’ Its Looks

Prospective customers of Nokia’s brand new Lumia 920 & 820 smartphones will be surprised and likely disappointed to find that the Lumia 820 has a micro SD card slot, but that its bigger brother, the Lumia 920, doesn’t. It’s not usually the case that as one goes up the range, features get removed, making this an odd situation. Even though the 920 has 32GB of onboard storage while the 820 just 8GB, it’s still odd to see that it can’t be expanded upon, especially since a removable storage device can make for a handy means of data transfer between devices, or as an important backup. This makes the only two ways of getting the data off the 920 either through the USB port, or wirelessly.

When Nokia was asked about this omission, their executive vice president, Kevin Shields, explained that it was done in order to preserve its looks, “We started with the premise that we wanted an uncompromised physical form. To put an SD card slot in it would have defiled it. Most people aren’t using the storage in their phone, anyway”.

However, he claimed that putting a micro SD port on the Lumia 820, sitting behind its removable cover, doesn’t compromise the design. Why there’s such a difference between the two phones over something like this isn’t clear and we suspect that there may also be a deeper reason for the omission. So there you have it, customers have to miss out on an important feature in the interests of style.