The news that the Samsung Galaxy S21 will lose a memory card slot was shared by authoritative insider Roland Quandt on the last day of 2020 on his Twitter. He also confirmed that Samsung has no plans to ship a charger with the new flagships. An exception can be made only by certain markets. He was probably referring to countries where manufacturers are legally obliged to complete mobile phones with certain accessories. For example, Apple has to ship the iPhone 12 to France with a wired headset, as it is illegal in that country to sell communications without hands-free talking devices.

If the information from Roland Quandt turns out to be reliable, then the Samsung Galaxy S21 will be the first representative of the Galaxy S series to not have a microSD slot. As for the Galaxy Note, the devices of this family were not always deprived of support for memory cards. The expansion slot was present in the first generations up to and including the Galaxy Note 4. In Galaxy Note5 it was removed, but in Note7 it was returned. The Galaxy Note8 and Note9 also supported microSD cards, but the Galaxy Note10 and Note20 have again dropped the option to expand the built-in storage.

However, the abandonment of the microSD slot in the Samsung Galaxy S21 can be justified. First, microSD is slower than the built-in UFS flash memory. And secondly, you can use an SSD with a USB Type-C interface as an external data storage with the Galaxy S21. According to preliminary data, the Galaxy S21, like its predecessor, will be equipped with at least 128 GB of flash memory.