How to make the most of your SD card on your Android

SD cards – those little storage devices that are inserted into your Android smart phone – can be a lot more useful than you might imagine.

There are many ways that you can use your SD card in your Android smart phone to your advantage, freeing up tons of space on your phone’s memory. This helps preserve battery life and ensures you aren’t constantly battling with the amount of space available on your Android smart phone.

One of the first useful things you can do is to save your contacts on your SD card, not only freeing up space but ensuring that if something happens to the phone, the contacts will still be in tact on your SD card as an external memory device. You’ll never have to worry about your phone having to be reset at the expense of all of your saved contacts. It’s also such a simple process, you’ll kick yourself if you haven’t done it before. Simply go into ‘Contacts’ on your Android smart phone. Tap ‘Menu’ and you’ll see there are options like ‘Manage Contacts’ or ‘Import/Export’. Go into these options until you find options like ‘Backup to SD Card’ or ‘Export to SD Card’. Click on it and you’ll see that all of your contacts are immediately moved to your SD Card.

Another great feature when it comes to using your Android smart phone’s SD card is the ability to save apps onto the card. This frees up an enormous amount of space on your phone. The only problem is that you have to check which apps are compatible or support being stored on your Android device’s SD card. Some Androids don’t even allow it all. If you go onto Google Play and are searching for apps, you can see if they are support SD storage simply by going into the ‘Permissions’ tab. This tab should be next to the ‘What’s New’ tab. Other tabs include ‘Overview’ and ‘User Reviews’. This is an example of how Google are trying to make the downloading and use of apps far easier.

There is also an amazing app on the Android market called App 2 SD, developed by Sam Lu. You can install it for free on your Android smart phone, where it helps you to free up space on your phone’s memory automatically. The app makes life very convenient, automatically moving apps that support SD storage to your SD card, notifying you when it has done so. This is a pleasure as you don’t have to do it manually. This also allows you far more control as well as the streamlining of the storage process – super nifty.

Another great tool to use your SD card for is to save photographs on it. This keeps them backed up on the storage device and means they don’t take up space on your phone’s internal storage space. And it’s very simple to save photographs to your SD card, where you simply change your ‘save’ settings on your phone’s camera app. Once you are in the settings options, there should be a way to save manually, meaning you can save them directly to your SD card if need be. However most Android smart phones should automatically save content like photographs onto the SD card, but just check up on this to ensure you aren’t taking up unnecessary space.

There are many ways to utilize your Android’s SD card, saving space and keeping your phone from having the life sucked out of it by all of those pictures, apps and contacts.