This past week’s been a tough one for Huawei. The Trump Administration banned the company from working with U.S. suppliers, meaning that Huawei’s relationship with Google will effectively end after August 19. We also saw Huawei lose its relationship with ARM, the company that helped build Huawei’s in-house Kirin processors.
Now, it’s been confirmed that Huawei has been removed as a member from the SD Association. The SD Association is the non-profit organization in charge of overseeing SD card standards, including microSD cards used in smartphones. While current Huawei phones with microSD card slots will continue to work just fine, this likely means future devices from the company won’t have this functionality.
Huawei happen to have already built a microSD competitor; you can already buy it. ‘Nano Memory Cards’ use more or less the same internal hardware as microSD cards do, just in the Nano SIM form factor. They can be dropped into compatible Nano SIM slots in Huawei devices just like inserting a microSD card into a SIM/microSD slot.
Their specs are competitive, too, available in standard sizes such as 128GB and 256GB with read speeds of 90 MB/s. The only issue is the price, which is horrifically triple that of an equivalent microSD card. Business is business, I suppose. Losing access to the microSD ecosystem is hardly Huawei’s or their customer’s biggest problem right now.
