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Mobile Syrup

Google will bring eSIM transfer feature to Android this year

Android will get a tool for transferring eSIM profiles later this year, Google revealed at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023.

Google will roll out eSIM transfer capabilities to Android in 2023, which should make the process much simpler than it currently is. For those who haven’t had to mess with eSIM yet, users currently need to unregister an eSIM profile from their old device before reactivating it on the new device. Sometimes, this process requires contacting your carrier (which, as most Canadians know, is a hellish exercise).

Although it’s not clear when these capabilities will arrive, my money would be on Android 14 delivering eSIM transfers. In part, this is due to preview builds of Android 14 featuring in-development pieces of the eSIM transfer tool.

While an exciting development for eSIM, it, unfortunately, won’t totally eliminate carriers from the process. Google also announced that Deutsche Telekom will be one of the first to adopt eSIM transfer on Android handsets. While that means little for Canadians, it does indicate Canadians will need to wait for Canadian carriers to support Android’s eSIM transfer feature.

eSIM has been around for some time, though support from carriers has so far been lacklustre. MobileSyrup’s creative director Brad Bennett recently hopped on the eSIM train after switching to Rogers — his experience was, well, not the best. Read all about it here.

Source: Android Police

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Mobile Syrup

Apple’s MacBook Pro has an SD card reader again, but only at UHS-II speeds

Apple has now confirmed the specifications for the built-in SD card slot on the new MacBook Pro. Disappointingly, the speed will max out at a little over 300MB/s.

Apple confirmed the speed to The Verge’s Dan Seifert, who posted the information to Twitter. Further, 9to5Mac shared an excellent breakdown of the various SD card standards, since it can be rather confusing.

First, there are two physical sizes of SD card — ‘full size’ SD cards and microSD cards, which are much smaller. You can get adapters to use microSD cards in full size SD card readers, however.

Next up are capacity categories, all of which the new MacBook Pros support:

  • SD (up to 2GB)
  • SDHC (up to 32GB)
  • SDXC (up to 2TB)
  • SDUC (up to 128TB)

Finally, are the speed ratings. We marked the ones supported by the new MacBook Pros with an asterisk (*) below:

  • Standard SD* – 12.5MB/s
  • High Speed (HS)* – 25MB/s
  • Ultra High Speed I (UHS-I)* – 104MB/s
  • Ultra High Speed II (UHS-II)* – 312MB/s
  • Ultra High Speed III (UHS-III) – 624MB/s
  • SD Express (HC/XC/UC) – 985MB/s or 1,970MB/s or 3,940MB/s

To further complicate all this, some UHS SD cards will show half of the speeds listed above. This is because that’s the maximum full ‘duplex speed’ where one lane each is assigned to a “downstream direction” like transferring data from the host to a card, and the other assigned to “upstream” for transferring data from the card to a host. Cards can also operate in a “half duplex” mode and use both lanes for one direction. According to the SD Association’s website, a UHS-II card could operate at 156MB/s in full duplex or 312MB/s in half duplex.

While it’s great that the new MacBook Pros brought back the SD card slot, it’s a little disappointing that it doesn’t support higher speeds. For most use cases, UHS-II is likely fine. But professional users like videographers or photographers may find themselves bumping up against that transfer speed ceiling more often than not.

Source: Dan Seifert (Twitter) Via: 9to5Mac