Category: Android

To have android treat an SD card like internal storage, you will need to format it as internal storage, a feature of android disabled by most manufacturers, so here is how to do it even when the button is missing.

After you get a RELIABLE big SD card, let us get the procedure out of the way, Read below about reliability and dangers etc.. before you decide on getting a cheaper SD card

This feature of android is called Adoptable Storage.

1- On your windows PC (Or mac): Download adb.exe, there are many places to download it on the internet, but for convenience, here is a 64 bit download of the adb.exe file, in my case, it came with Android Stdio, and i found it in C:\Users\yazeed\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\platform-tools, obviously you will have your username in place of yazeed in the path above

2- On your phone: Open your phone, Go to Settings, About, Software information, And tap repeatedly on Build Number until it informs you that you are now a developer

3- On your phone: A new developer options Menu should appear, Open it and enable USB debugging

4- Connect the phone to the computer via USB cable

5- On your windows PC (Or mac): Open the command prompt (CMD/Shell), I ran it as administrator to avoid any surprises, and run the following commands, obviously, you will need to change the directory to wherever you put the adb.exe file

cd C:\Users\yazeed\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk\platform-tools
adb shell
sm list-disks
** disk:179,64 <= as you can see, this handle/identifier is our SD card inside the phone
sm partition disk:179,64 private

6- Disconnect the wire.

7- Go to settings => storage => sd card (where yo normally format an SD card), then from the three button menu on the top right, select Migrate data, this will move the existing data from internal to SD card.

So right now, We have formatted the SD card as internal storage, the way this works is that the SD card is overlayed over the existing storage, so whatever you already have on your internal memory is not masked by mounting a new SD card in it’s place, but whatever you save from this point on will be saved to the SD card.

Pros	Cons
* The SD card size is added to the internal phone storage so you can install apps on the SD card and have apps store data on SD card when they don’t offer the option to do that natively * The internal phone flash memory is not consumed as fast due to flash wear, even though phones usually fail for other reasons before the flash failiure occures, it is mentioned here for completeness	* You can not plug this SD card into your computer, in fact, you are expected to never ever remove it from your phone, this is to avoid catastrophic failiure and data loss * If your SD card fails or otherwise goes bad, data loss will not only affect the data, but also afects your applications and settings, making the damage much worse * A slow SD card might affect your phone’s performance.

There are a few things to keep in mind, I ordered them by importance, most important first.

• ADB.EXE is a file from google, part of the development tools, and not a third party tool, it’s for android debugging by the people who make android
• *RELIABLE: The SD card you chose must be super reliable as failure of the card will result in loss of your data, applications, settings, and your phone’s functionality in general, making it much worse than when using the SD card as external storage, Get an SD card with wear leveling, as the ext2/ext4 file system that android uses is not too good with flash memory, I personally use sandisk, some sandisk models explicitly state that they have wear leveling, get those, and beware, there are many many fake SD cards on the market, so get it from a reliable source.
• *FAST: The SD card you chose needs to be fast, the faster the better, even though at some point, the speed of the SD card hits the phone’s limit (the speed the phone can access the SD card), having a very fast SD card will ensure fastest possible operation of your favorite apps
• *One partition: I have seen people online split the SD card into some internal storage, and some external, but they provide no justification to the benefits of this, as windows will only read the first partition of the disk, My advice is to use the whole SD card as internal, as ther benefit of having part of it as external storage is debatable at best.In case you are wondering how that is done, in place of the line where it says

  sm partition disk:179,64 private

  You will need to use

  sm partition disk:179,64 mixed 20

  The alternative line you see above will create an internal storage partition of 80% and leave 20% as external SD storage

• *WHATSAPP: The main reason i did this to my phone is that my whatsapp messenger is bombarded with gigabytes of video all the time, and whatsapp does not natively allow for storing media files such as video to external SD cards, in this solution, there is no compromise as the solution is invisible to whatsapp, whatsapp now stores media to the SD card with no real compromise.
• Why is it disabled in most phones: This is a good question, The official reason, which is a valid, legitimate reason, why companies like samsung asus and others disable this feature is reliability, manufacturers can’t guarantee that yo did your homework and got a reliable and fast SD card, they also can not guarantee you will not accidentally switch the phone on after removing the card, or even remove the card while the phone is running, so in short, leaving this feature in is unwise for the average user, a great side effect (To them) from this legitimate reason is that they can sell larger capacity phones at a higher price and a higher profit margin, but that is irrelevant as the first reason is very legitimate.
• *Learn: To learn more about the technology, you can visit the Adoptable tech page on the official android website, https://source.android.com/devices/storage/adoptable
• * Temporarily taking it out: Most phones these days come with Dual SIM, and in most cases, an SD card slot that takes the place of the second SIM card, the issue here is that if you ever need to use the second SIM card slot for a SIM card, you can not just temporarily pull the SD card out without causing massive damage to your apps and data, god knows how the system and it’s sb systems will react to missing data and applications, probably by recreating them blank again, and when you insert the SD card again, there will be a clash of file names.

Before i tell you that there has been a software update for this phone, let me remind you of my review of the phone

The lowdown: right after the update, i tested the P698 dual sim android, and i can say that the phone which was a disaster before the update is perfectly usable now, i would still prefer the samsung galaxy Y duos (GT-S6102)

I have only used this phone as a 3G modem up to now, when i tried to use it as a phone, it was a disaster, the phone battery does not last for a day, and this is nothing compared to the very faulty software, ending a phone call is very hard to do (you need to wait 10 seconds before you can be sure the other party can no longer hear you) that is, if this magical phone does not get into stupid mode and make ending the phone call mission impossible, in short, the phone is a disaster.

Worth mentioning is that the phone hardware is pretty OK, in some regards better than the Samsung Y duos, it is the software that is a disaster, the only thing that i consider essential and is missing from the hardware is the proximity sensor (the one that disables the touch screen when the phone is close to your face). CORRECTION: THE LG P698 does have a proximity sensor, and with the new update it works just fine.

So, today i decided to check whether the phone got a new software update, and indeed it has (the second), this update is named (and dated) v10g-jul-06-2012, where the update right before this one was v10f-mar-07-2012, so what did LG do in those 3 months, any news of fixing the bugs that were killing me ?

I will now install both my lines into this phone (from my very usable and useful Samsung Y duos), i will try the phone for a couple of days and let everyone know of the results, i am not optimistic

I will be back in a couple of days to tell you all if the phone is better now.

The update:
The new update improves the software so that this phone is now usable compared to a phone i bought and could not use, the samsung galaxy Y duos is still better than this phone (and has the swype application that is very nice), so i am still favoring the Samsung Galaxy Y duos, but the LG P698 is not so bad now, it works as a phone just fine

I like the idea of Dual SIM android phones because one SIM can provide data at a cheaper rate, the other can be my phone line, and i will not experience overages on my main phone like (billed at a premium when over quota).

The LOWDOWN, Get SAMSUNG, if you like get the ALCATEL, stay away from the LG, it is a disaster, 3 LG Phones suffered the same exact problems.

I have tried 3 Android dual SIM phones to date.

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos (S6102)
Excellent up to now, no problems with this phone at all, but we have only used it for 3 days up to now (We are 3 people with three phones)

ALCATEL ONE TOUCH BLAZE DUO OT-890D
A bit slow, dialer good, not very responsive, but works as a mobile phone, don’t expect to flawlessly play angry birds

LG Optimus NET duo – LG-P698
A complete disaster despite the excellent hardware (for the price), All 3 phones (now replaced with the SAMSUNG) have the same exact problems, software for all 3 phones was updated to the latest software, and still a disaster.

The best hardware rendered useless with LG’s very bad dialer, the dialer hangs, sometimes calls people and there is no way to stop the call, takes a good 10 seconds at best to hang up, and if you press hang up more than once, it will call the person back, all in all, the basics are hell in this phone.

The battery is also very very bad, 16 hours at best if you don’t use it at all (Had one 3G sim card and 1 GSM only SIM card), the power manegemnt of the phone is not all that good and that is probably the reason it depletes a battery bigger than the samsung battery in much less time.

The good side of it is that it is very fast when sharing the internet by becoming a potable hotspot (WIFI tethering), it’s browser is good, it’s hardware is good, it has 512MB of ram (That’s plenty), but it is a very bad phone.