[HTC One S] Sirandar:
Hi All

I currently have a HTC Desire Z which I love ..... unfortunately my touchscreen intermittently becomes non-responsive in the middle and a factory reset didn't fix.

As part of a Product Replacement Plan Bell Canada will give me a HTC One S for 150$ ....

The HTC One S looks like a wonderful phone except for one head scratching unbelievable crippling ..... only 10GB of storage and no SD slot.

Unfortunately, this omission makes this phone a big step backwards from my Desire Z. Why? .... because my unlocked Froyo Desire Z with apps already does everything I want it to reasonably quickly and I can store all my music on it because I have a 32GB microSD card in it.

I don't want to spend hours figuring which tracks and photos I want to store locally on the phone. It becomes a nightmare of babysitting. With the Desire Z all I have to do is sync a few tracks here and there as I add them to my PC.

Is there any way to get around this limitation?

I have used Dropbox and the phone comes with 20Gig of Dropbox Storage, but really what good is that for music or even pictures? Is Dropbox so integrated with the OS that it is just like they are local except for a some lag. Otherwise how would I find tracks and play them in the music player. Would PowerAMP be able to catalog them? What about album art, playlists and lyrics? I can't see how any would work gracefully with Dropbox, even if it was integrated, as cataloging the tracks properly would mean accessing 32GB of on-line files, which would take days and cost a fortune.

I have already compressed my music to the minimum acceptable quality in OGG and it barely fits a 32GB card.

I think there already is a microSD card slot present in the HTC OneS ...... has anyone taken a shot at un-crippling it?

If it wasn't for this problem I would be more than happy with this phone, but the crippling seriously affects how I actually currently use my Desire Z.

What could have possibly be going through the designers minds to have a microSD card slot and disable it? I know SD storage is a major pain in Froyo because somewhere in the chain from APP programmer to Google Play market something is messed up because a lot of 3rd party apps cause SD card corruption, but I would have thought that would have got fixed by ICS.

If I wanted a 10GB phone with no expansion I would have bought an Iphone. HTC just removed one of the features that brought me to Android in the first place. I find it hard to believe that SD memory controller chip just wouldn't fit in the case. The only reason I can think of is that HTC wants to go back to the bad old days of renting content by forcing users on line to pay data and rental fees. But that doesn't make sense unless they are desperate to please carriers.

I will probably end up telling Bell to keep this phone unless somebody here has some advice or workaround.

The Samsung Galaxy IIIS might be an option but I am shy on Samsung because they used to be the worst cripplers. I had a Samsung SGH255 that wouldn't even let me set a jpg picture as a background unless the picture was taken with the phone it was so locked down. Those were the bad old days and I see removing SD storage as the first step back to those days.