Big Pockets: Storage on the Lumia 1520

The Nokia Lumia 1520 is a big phone for demanding users, as I’ve discussed previously.

But it’s not just the 6-inch 1080p full HD screen that’s huge. It’s also got a massive battery, a beast of a processor and – the subject of this post – lots and lots of storage space.

My Lumia 1520 has 32GB of storage onboard with another 32GB available on a microSD card in the slot on the side. That’s nearly double what came on my first PC – though that was cough! …some time ago.

Choosing a microSD card

The Lumia 1520 can take up to a 64GB card, but they are disproportionately more expensive, and unless you’re planning to remake Titanic on your Lumia, 32GB of extra storage is probably more than you’ll ever use.

The main thing to watch out for is the speed class of the card. You can record HD video direct to your memory card if it’s fast enough. . Class 4 has been perfectly adequate in my experience, but for optimal performance, we recommend a fast 4-32GB card by a well-known manufacturer.

Fill her up

Next thing to do is make sure you’re carrying around hours of video, all your photographs and days of music on your memory card.

There are lots of ways to do this – through the Windows desktop and fullscreen apps, and their MacOS equivalent. Or you can simply attach your phone to your computer with a USB cable and use it as an external drive, dragging your media files into place.

First things first, though. There are a couple of settings you need to change on your phone once you’ve got a suitable SD card slotted into place.

Go to Settings->Phone Storage and look for the two boxes at the bottom of the screen. These will respectively let you store new music and videos, and new pictures, on your card, rather than the main memory. Make sure these both say ‘SD Card’.

You can’t store everything on SD Cards – apps and maps go in the main memory, for example. But having ensured that all your media is going onto the card, you’d have to have a pretty serious app-addiction to fill up 32GB.