I’ll be eligible for an update from my Galaxy 4s in a week, but I want a phone with a user replaceable battery and a micro-SD slot. Do such phones exist anymore? If not, I guess I’ll stick with what I have.
I think you can still get a Galaxy Note 4 that the battery is replaceable on. Other than that I don’t know but not on the Note 5.
Lg Vizio is what I had to buy to get those features. I must say that a couple design choices I find annoying, like the power and volume buttons being on the back, and the onscreen back and home buttons which sometimes need to be coaxed out of hiding. It makes up for these shortcomings by still allowing the replaceable battery, SD card slot, and the secondary mini screen, which I actually find very handy.
I think some of the other brand Androids still have those features. No iPhones have that. Top of the line Samsungs seem to have discontinued the swappable batteries and SD slots. The SD slots are security problems because a data thief merely has to open the phone take out the SD card, copy the data, and stick it back in. voila, data stolen. They are also means of sneaking data or malware into an secure environment for transfer onto a computer. As such they are not allowed in many secure locations.
As for swappable batteries, unless the entire lower back of the phone IS the battery, swappable batteries require the phone to be thicker and heavier due to engineering requirements for the replaceable battery to have a protective case, and the phone to have a door and contacts, and a wall between the battery compartment and critical internal components. It means the battery has to be smaller with less capacity than it could have been to accommodate all those extra walls, doors, contacts, etc. So, to give you what you want: a removable battery, every phone with one, has to have a lower capacity battery and therefore less talk and standby time.
There are reasons why more modern phones are dropping these features.
There no more service contracts, now you contract only the phone at full price. Will make less people buy phones that often.
LG G4 has a removable battery. So does their V10. Both great phones.
The LG V10 has a replaceable battery and a micro SD slot.
User-hangable batter is a dying feature, not because of a lack of demand, but because of several other factors - profit margins, lawyers (3rd-party batteries are notoriously dangerous), and planned obsolescence all play in to the mix.
As far as an SD/MicroSD/etc. memory expansion - I’ve not kept tabs on the Android offerings, though I know that has been a common feature - one that I really do wish we could get in iPhones. I cannot help but wonder if that is going to be a dying feature as well, if for no other reason than to drive hardware sales (no more easy storage space, so must buy larger capacity phone...).