This is why your next Huawei phone could have no microSD card slot

It was a little perplexing for us when we saw Huawei unveil their brand new memory expansion standard, the NM Card, with the Mate 20 series. NM Cards weren’t inherently faster than microSD cards, nor were they more affordable, and they hardly take up much less space in your smartphone.

At the time it seemed odd that Huawei would want to reinvent the wheel like this, but today it looks like NM could be the only way you would get access to memory expansion on a Huawei smartphone.

Thanks to a new report that surfaced today, we found out that Huawei may have been given the boot by the SD Association. It looks like the association, that was established for the purpose of setting memory card standards and promoting SD memory card related technologies, has unceremoniously removed Huawei from their list of member companies.

With this exclusion, Huawei may not be able to make smartphones with microSD card slots because to be able to manufacture and sell SD card compatible devices, you would first have to be a member of the SDA.

While it’s true that Huawei has its own NM Card standard on flagship devices like the Huawei Mate 20 and P30, the company still uses microSD card slots in their more affordable handsets. Devices that are as new as the Huawei Nova 4e and the Huawei Y7 Pro, both come with microSD memory expansion — something that’s pretty vital when it comes to affordable smartphones.

It remains to be seen how this will really affect Huawei’s devices moving forward, but we’ve reached out to Huawei for a statement and will update this post as soon as we hear back from them.