I'm frustrated with the lack of sdcard options in upper midrange smartphones.
If you get a midrange smartphone you either compromise on processor, ram, storage or a combination of other.
I want a good quality smartphone which has 45w of minimum fast charging, UFS 3.1 256GB of minimum. 12GB ram, snapdragon 7+gen 2, or dimensity 8300 at minimum. And provides an sdcard option.
Is it that hard for brands to do that?
Nothing phone 2 and 2a would've been decent. If they had an sdcard option. Alas, they skipped it for some reason..
I wouldn't say no reason. It's to make more money by forcing you to pay for more onboard storage, the same as any other manufacturer. Others, like Google, have an even clearer incentive to kill the SD card as it threatens the cloud storage subscription they want you to pay an ongoing fee for.
I think it is because Nothing has couple of wireless earbuds in the market already and they really want people to purchase them. A 3.5mm jack will stymie that.
Curiously, their Nothing Buds support the LDAC codec(though few phones outside Sony do) but many more expensive wireless versions(looks at Sennheiser) don't.
My moto g84 has most of that I think. The only things that let it down are the mediocre camera and the speaker volume that jumps from just a little too quiet to rather loud. For $AU300 I'm quite happy.