Facepalm: Pouring salt on the wound, Huawei has now been kicked out of the SD Association. Nothing will happen to existing products, but future smartphones and laptops won't be able to employ the universal portable storage standard, leading Huawei to switch to yet another proprietary backup solution.

In case you've been under a rock lately, an executive order determined to kick Huawei off the face of the Earth banned all US companies from doing business with the Chinese firm, including big names like Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom.

That means no Android, Play Store, Windows or all the essential chips that go into smartphones and laptops. Notably, though, Huawei has also been "temporarily restricted" from the Wi-Fi Alliance, which controls Wi-Fi standards; cut off from ARM, who licenses key design aspects of Huawei's Kirin processors; and they've also voluntarily left JEDEC, which defines RAM specifications.

Huawei is in a world of pain.

But there is a bright side: they happen to have already built a microSD competitor; you can already buy it. 'Nano Memory Cards' use more or less the same internal hardware as microSD cards do, just in the Nano SIM form factor. They can be dropped into compatible Nano SIM slots in Huawei devices just like inserting a microSD card into a SIM/microSD slot.

Their specs are competitive, too, available in standard sizes such as 128GB and 256GB with read speeds of 90 MB/s. The only issue is the price, which is horrifically triple that of an equivalent microSD card. Business is business, I suppose. Losing access to the microSD ecosystem is hardly Huawei's (or their customer's) biggest problem right now.