I hate to say it, but remember the giant outrage and making fun of Microsoft everyone did over Surface Tablets with over half their HD taken up by the OS? Less than a year later now it's quite noticeable in Android space... :/ Either we need to really rip into Samsung or maybe we need to be less hard on MS on this particular topic...
It wouldn't matter if you had control over it. but 3Gb of those are for useless S-apps (S-suggest, S-store, whatever) that you will NEVER open. in fact, those are the apps that if you do open, you curse the mistake and close.<p>samsung is the Acer of mobiles. Other brands used to do that to branded phones and you would find att or verizon bloatware. now you are not free even if you buy unlocked.
PSA: check out the HTC One[0] before buying the Galaxy S4. It's as good, if not better, than the Galaxy S4.<p>0: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF75-HPdUfY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF75-HPdUfY</a>
Shame nobody has done a breakdown of exactly what is being held in this used up space.<p>From what I can find the system folder is 2 GB alone, but we're still well short of almost 5 GB of "stuff." We likely also have a backup image, and then just Samsung's bundled apps?<p>As a random aside: Why are they still selling 16 GB phones in 2013? I realise the chips are faster than what goes into SD Cards, but given the speed of SSDs and the relative price decrease year upon year, if phones were keeping up we'd be seeing at least 64 GB as standard!
If one ever looks at the various OEM firmwares, they're all ridiculously huge even for just being compressed images when comparing to vanilla Android. HTC is also similar in bloat, but just giving the S3 comparison since it was handy and related to the topic:<p>Samsung Galaxy S3 stock firmware: ~740mb[1]<p>Google Nexus 4 firmware: 327mb[2]<p>[1] <a href="http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=33570269#post33570269" rel="nofollow">http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=33570269#po...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#occamjdq39" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#occamjdq3...</a>
I just don't understand why these manufacturers are always claiming inaccurate storage amounts. It's easy to fix:<p><i></i>Storage = physical_storage_capacity - storage_used_by_stock_OS<i></i><p>Doesn't the Surface Pro have some ludicrous claim of storage size too?
I didn't think this was a problem, because the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a micro-SD slot. However, the article says that apps CANNOT be installed on micro-SD. Is this a recent thing? Does anyone know why they'd do that?
First off, it's 8.5GB of usable space of the 15.4GB of total space on the phone once we convert it from 'marketing' sizes to real sizes. So, there is 6.9GB of stuff taking up space on the phone out of the box.<p>Second, 8.5GB of space is just fine for most uses, at least according to Google. They sell a Nexus 4 8GB with only 5.5GB of space free on it.<p>Third, and this is the key point here, the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a handy microSD port so you can add all kinds of memory to it. Memory that is a lot less expensive than going up a size. You can get a 64GB class 10 microSD card for under $60, just a bit more than going from an 8GB Nexus 4 to a 16GB Nexus 4.<p>The one sad point is that Google is making it harder to utilize the microSD, harder to move apps to the SD card (unless you run CyanogenMOD like I do), impossible to store your music/video on the card (movies you rent/buy from Google can't be saved to microSD, in a vain attempt at preventing piracy), etc.
this is similar to ISP's claiming: Unlimited Internet/Download, and still saying "subject to Fair Usage Policy"<p>This is BS, I would not buy a Samsung phone, when I can do it. Company policy towards such issues, reflects it overall approach to quality delivery to customers.<p>My friend was actually asking my opinion the other day, I would tell him to choose Iphone5
Maybe they could change the way they do advertising: the amount of raw storage and the amount of available storage, similarly to the way they do hard drives (raw vs. formatted).