Galaxy S II: The Missing Manual

MicroSD Card

JUST ABOVE THE BATTERY, you’ll also find a small slot for the MicroSD card, which is about the size of a fingernail, and much smaller than the normal SD memory cards used in cameras. Your Galaxy S II may not have shipped with an SD card, so you may have to buy one. The Galaxy S II can use one that stores up to 32 GB of data. Like the SIM card, place it with the gold-colored contacts facing down.

When you first put in a MicroSD card, you’ll have to tell your phone to use it. After you insert the card, turn on your phone and from the Home screen, press the Menu key. Select Settings→Storage and tap Mount SD Card. If your phone doesn’t recognize it after that, tap Format SD Card.

Note

If you’ve got a MicroSD card in your phone and you’ve stored files on it, make sure not to tap Format SD Card. When you do that, you erase all of the data stored on it.

In the SD card section of the Storage section, you can see how much total space is on the SD card, and how much space remains.

If you want to replace the SD card (for example, if you have a 16 GB card and want to replace it with one that has more capacity), it’s easy to do. From the Home screen, press the Menu key, and then select Settings Storage. Then tap “Unmount SD card.”

When you’ve done that, turn off the phone’s power and remove the battery cover. You can then slide out the MicroSD card. Then insert new MicroSD card, and follow the instructions above for telling your Galaxy S II to recognize it.