One of the many quirks about Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 is that it only has just over 7GB of its 16GB internal memory free, straight out of the box. Samsung’s official party line was that so much space was necessary to deliver the Galaxy’s ‘more powerful features’, although I think truthfully it was just badly-written code.
After the BBC consumer affairs programme, Watchdog investigated Samsung’s claims, Samsung appear to have had a change of heart, telling CNet UK that they ‘are reviewing the possibility to secure more memory space through further software optimisation’.
Source: CNet UK.
Given that Android IS Linux.. the break down is like this: 16GB is realistically only 15GB after the file system overheads and the 1000MB/1GB problem. The Root partition and system files takes up 1GB (14 left). 4GB is also mapped out for the EXT Data partition that is used for the user installation files (10GB left). Samsung + Telco Bloatware 1GB (9GB left). the 9GB left is partitioned as FAT32 which can be read by Windows. I had the same problem when I got my Motorola Razr as well. The previous generations of Galaxy’s would only have 2GB of EXT… Read more »
You got this around the wrong way – it’s USING 7GB out of 16GB total, leaving just over 9GB left for the user out of the box.
+1
Yep, Jesse is right. My brother just got the Voda version yesterday and it shows over 9GB available. Although with the preloaded stuff theres is about 8GB available out of the box. But if you really wanted you could free up some space up to about 9GB. Still too small though. The amount of space they used for the features screams bad code. I’m waiting for the 32 GB version for that reason.
He doesn’t have it the wrong way around. If I format my Galaxy S4 it starts with 7.08GB free from 9.22GB reported total space (15.62GB is the total storage theoretically). So only just over 7GB is usable, while the other 9GB (8.54GB to be exact) is used by the system, Its quite pathetic to be honest, and my main gripe with an otherwise great phone. You pretty much need a memory card because the internal memory is less than half its advertised amount.