One of the biggest complaints from consumers in regards to the iPhone is the lack of expandable memory. Combine that with the always-minimal storage they continue to put in their lower-end models and you end up with a disaster waiting to happen if you take a lot of photos and prefer to keep them on your device rather than syncing them to the cloud.
Thankfully, you don’t have to shell out the big bucks to increase your iPhone’s storage. That is, if you don’t mind taking a trip to China’s Shenzhen market, where they will upgrade your iPhone’s memory for only $60—$140 less than the premium you’d pay if you bought the larger phone directly from Apple.
YouTube user BeSound has shared an interesting video showing roughly how the process is done.
Cellphones have, overwhelmingly, been the most popular camera used around the world. After all, everyone seems to have one and it’s a heck of a lot easier to carry around a phone with camera capabilities than a dedicated camera. Last year alone, it’s estimated that roughly 11 trillion…yes, with a ’T’…were taken last year alone.
As interesting as it would be to do this yourself, it seems as though a great deal of specialized tools and machinery is required. Instead, you must put your faith in the fingers, brains and patience of the Shenzhen market vendors, who will take care of the process from beginning to end for you.
While there are a great deal of variables that go into how many photos an iPhone can hold, some back of the napkin math tells me that your average 16GB iPhone can hold about 5,000–6,000 images. That is, a 16GB iPhone realistically comes with about 12GB of storage to use (the rest is used by the operating system), which means at roughly 2MB per image, you should end up around the 5,000–6,000 mark.
This hack means you could effectively multiply that by ten for a whopping 50,000–60,000 images, give or take a few thousand depending on other apps, the images taken, etc. Regardless, it seems like a very worthwhile hack for anyone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty and potentially risking the health of their iOS device.
If you happen to be in the Shenzhen market area and you’re brave enough to give it a shot, let us know how it turns out.
[via Redmond Pie]
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