They look the same and have the same capacity.  For consumers shopping for a microSD card, the only difference might appear to be their price. Does it really matter which microSD card you buy? Should you go with the cheapest option?

Turns out, there’s more to that little plastic chip than you can see on the outside.
It may come as a surprise, but choosing a microSD card is actually an important decision that affects the performance of your phone or other mobile device. Pair a cheapo microSD with your top notch smartphone and you’re setting yourself up for a whole range of problems, ranging from memory failures and corrupted files to crashing your entire phone OS.

“The fact that there are a lot of fake cards out there,” reports Richard Lai of Engadget interviewing Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s Vice President of International.

The market abounds with SanDisk that is not really SanDisk, Kingston that is not really Kingston, and other major manufacturers that are possibly just cheap Chinese fakes. It’s not hard to print out a name-brand sticker and put it on a generic microSD. Barra elaborated on the problem:

“You think you’re buying like a Kingston or a SanDisk but you’re actually not, and they’re extremely poor quality, they’re slow, they sometimes just stop working, and it gives people huge number of issues, apps crashing all the time, users losing data, a lot of basically complaints and customer frustration. It’s gonna be a while before you finally accept that maybe the reason why it’s not performing is because you put in an SD card.”

Because of the prevalence of sub-quality microSD cards on the market, the problem has many smartphone manufacturers choosing not to put microSD slots in their high-end, flagship phones at all. There’s just too much potential for disaster and the problems that come up usually get blamed on the innocent phone, rather than the tiny memory card hiding inside of it, jamming up the works.

But despite the concern from big brands, microSD slots are still a big selling point for shoppers.
If you do value the ability to increase your smartphone’s memory beyond its out-of-the-box capacity, make sure the card you’re slipping inside is a quality product – not a phone-debilitating enemy in disguise.

It’s important to not only choose a brand you can trust, but also with a reliable distributor; preferably, an official partner of a top-quality brand like Panasonic or Kingston. Our official partnership with Panasonic is just one reason DIGISTOR is a preferred retailer for high-end, quality microSD cards you can trust. If you’d like to learn more about our quality control and microSD card compatibility, call up one of our sales associates for more information.