Seven more days to the launch of the Huawei Mate 20 in London. Today, we are going to talk about the card slot. Rumours have suggested that the Mate 20 will not be equipped with a card slot. Many people are wondering why Huawei made that decision.

Rival phone manufacturers have been able to equip their flagship models with an external card slot. For example, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was released with a card slot for microSD supporting up to 512GB capacity. (See our review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 review here)

We believe Huawei did this for one reason, speed. When a phone is equipped with a microSD slot, the SoC (System-on-Chip) needs to access two types of storage, one internal and the microSD storage when it is given a request to search for a file. Internal storage (the storage that the phone has built-in) is faster because it is sitting directly on the SoC of the phone.

A microSD slot on the other hand, is not on the SoC but rather some distance away, even if it’s a few millimetres. Due to this distance, it will take extra microseconds to access any data on the microSD slot.

That’s our opinion on the microSD topic. Tell us what you think in the comments below!