I am traveling to Europe to do an extended 3 week Rhine River tour in April 2018.
My concern is if I have enough storage on my phone (Galaxy Note5) to download maps, podcasts, city guides, transit apps of Amsterdam and Switzerland, keep important documents such as B&B reservations AND keep photos I take. I do take a lot of photos...I just discovered that the phone does NOT have a microSD slot.
I have cleaned up my photo gallery and documents and the memory on my phone now is 12 gig available.
Are there any other work arounds to acquiring more storage? I was thinking about a thumb drive but I am not tech savvy enough to know if this is even possible, and if it IS-is it easily accessible while we are walking about town?
Anyone have any suggestions? Is the 12g enough for my podcasts, maps, city guides et al?
Thanks for the help!
Diane
Posted by
859 posts
If you search for: Note5 external storage you'll get many hits. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ_u5IRn-wA
You may want to keep some documents, like resevation info, in the cloud (dropbox, google drive, etc).
Posted by
Grand Rapids, MI
768 posts
Quick answer: yes, that should be plenty of room.
I use Here Maps (free app) and maps of Switz take .3 GB and Germany 1.5 GB.
I take a lot of pics and typically use 2-3 GB.
Transit apps and city guides and reservations are small in comparison.
Thumb drives typically don't work well with smart phones, unless you have OTG, but now it gets too technical.
If you are with a friend who has a laptop then you can copy your photos over to that, typically with your charger cord if it has a USB on one end.
Posted by
Portland, Oregon
5687 posts
I just looked up the specs on this phone. I am baffled that such a recent phone doesn't have a microSD slot. I'm guessing your version has only 32GB of flash storage. ("Only" compared to other versions of that phone that have up to 128GB built-in - my brand new Moto E4 has only 16GB, but has a microSD slot that can hold a 128GB card.)
There are devices that let you off-load photos, though I've never used one with a phone. One option would be to buy a little netbook and use that, but I guess that's one more thing you'd have to carry around. But you'd be able to copy your pictures off to the netbook with a cable then erase them from the phone to free up space. I see on the Acer "Recertified Store" that they have an 11.6" laptop (a full-size keyboard - the size I use every day lately) with a 500GB hard drive right now for $185.99. That would be plenty of room for pictures. All you need is an Android data/charging cable (maybe you already have one attached to your charger) and you can copy your pictures right over.
You could try uploading pictures on the fly to the cloud somewhere too, I guess when you get to places with WiFi. Uploading with data would eat up your data pretty fast most likely unless you have a lot of it to use on the phone.
That said, 12GB of space isn't really awful - not a lot but you might live with that for three weeks. How much space on average do your pictures use up on that phone? That's what I'd need to know. How many pictures will fit in 1GB? Podcasts and maps shouldn't really take that much space.
Posted by
Portland, Oregon
5687 posts
Oh, forget about my netbook suggestion...try this:
Just buy a USB thumb drive with a microUSB port plus a cable to connect it. Should be pretty easy, at least as a way to backup photos and free up space on the phone.