Samsung's Galaxy S4 16GB version only has 8GB of usable storage | Hacker News Reader

Samsung's Galaxy S4 16GB version only has 8GB of usable storage

crave.cnet.co.uk

30 pointssinnerswing48 comments

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...

The reason we won't express outrage isn't quite because we consciously choose to go easy on Samsung and go hard on Microsoft, it's rather that protest fatigue has set in. Lying about true storage capacity is a thing that companies do now... and when it becomes a thing, the fight is usually half lost, people will come to just expect such things, and indeed, accept them for what they are.

Isn't that what the article is saying? People are complaining. It doesn't sound like Samsung gets a pass while Microsoft doesn't. 8GB remaining isn't going to last on a phone.

The difference is that the Samsung Galaxy has expandable memory. So, unlike the Nexus 4 which comes with 8GB (total, usable is less), you just pop in a microSD and have plenty of room.

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.

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.

Woah, what? 3GB on apps that aren't games? That is incredibly poor.

They're all badly written bloatware like you'd expect.

Plus even if you remove them you still get the pleasure of storing a larger than necessary backup/recovery image with them inside just waiting to re-infect your phone if you ever factory reset it.

I own a Samsung Galaxy Note 1. While I think the hardware is top rate and I am happy with Android, I think Samsung's bloatware ruins the entire package. I prefer the experience on my Nexus 7 with "virgin" Android and my next phone will be a Nexus phone too for that reason.

Why not just root and CM the G Note? Anything samsung-specific that stock android won't work with?

because i never bought one.

giving them my money would just signal i want that crap.

Also, it's not stable so far. so you'd have dodgy camera, reception, pen... i don't think CM supports the pen yet, but i may be wrong.

PSA: check out the HTC One[0] before buying the Galaxy S4. It's as good, if not better, than the Galaxy S4.

0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF75-HPdUfY

I am still toting around a Nexus One, and finally going to get a new phone. I've been looking at both the HTC One and the Samsung S4.

The S4 has the huge advantages of having an SDcard slot (up to 64GB) and a replaceable battery. The HTC One has neither. I wonder how much of the internal flash on the HTC One is available.

The argument of the 16GB model not having a lot of internal flash space is pretty weak when you can get a 32GB SDcard for $20 (or less).

The HCT One does feel kind of nice with its weight and aluminum body, but I'm not sure it would do any better than the S4 in a drop test.

Speaking of drop tests, I've replaced the digitize on my Nexus One twice now, because I like to drop it. The S4 is difficult to replace the front glass, but it is not impossible. I do not know how the HTC One fairs in repairability.

On the CPU side, the S4 is faster, but they are the same CPU in both units as far as I know.

The HTC has a better screen color profile, and the camera does much better low-light/night shots. I have heard the the S4 camera does not do well in low-light conditions, which is really shameful.

HTC has a deal going on right now where they will give you a $100 debit card rebate. That could turn the tide in their direction if you are buying on price alone.

The top concern I have, though, is modability and community support, since I know that neither HTC nor Samsung will support that device once they have my money. I will immediately root it and install something like Cyanogen.

Both phones will likely have pretty good support from the Cyanogenmod project, but I am going to wait until the end of May and then go see what the community says. Whichever hardware has better support in the Cyanogen community will be the one I buy.

I'm not sure about how the S4 is doing, but there are already CM builds for the One. Plus, it's super easy to unlock the bootloader by just going to htcdev.com (though not if you have an AT&T phone, I believe). To unlock the S4 you have to rely on hacks.

Steve posted a screenshot of CM on the S4 yesterday, I suppose it will turn up eventually.

HTC One doesn't have a replaceable battery and has no microsd slot. That alone makes the S4 better for me.

Shame nobody has done a breakdown of exactly what is being held in this used up space.

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?

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!

It's just speculation, but I think Google is pushing indirectly for more cloud based storage utilization and getting OEMs on board is a way to do that via shrinking storage size (it's a trait with many of the new phones on more than just Samsung).

At the same time though, that clashes with the carriers limiting monthly alloted data more than any ever before. However, the carriers are probably going to push their own "cloud" solutions that won't use data that applies to a user's data cap.If that is the case, there will probably be some sort of clash between Google and the larger carriers in the near future where something will have to give. Probably goes with Google's recent venture into the wireless access realm[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5110076

This is pretty out-there speculation. I find it very difficult to imagine a meeting at Google where they collectively agree to increase the Android footprint in order to "increase Cloud storage usage".

Not the OS footprint, just reducing the internal storage size of devices (such as the Nexus 4 is only 8gb and 16gb while the Galaxy Nexus was 16gb and 32gb). There's a number of other current devices out there with a similar trend, such as the HTC Droid DNA (with only 16gb). Though it doesn't apply to every device, since the HTC One is 32gb and 64gb.

Maybe because batteries aren't keeping up.

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:

Samsung Galaxy S3 stock firmware: ~740mb[1]

Google Nexus 4 firmware: 327mb[2]

[1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=33570269#po...

[2] https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#occamjdq3...

I just don't understand why these manufacturers are always claiming inaccurate storage amounts. It's easy to fix:

Storage = physical_storage_capacity - storage_used_by_stock_OS

Doesn't the Surface Pro have some ludicrous claim of storage size too?

From Microsoft’s site:

The 64 GB Surface Pro has approximately 30 GB storage available for user content

The 128 GB Surface Pro has approximately 89 GB storage available for user content

http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/storage

(Note that this information is not given on the Surface Pro specs page.)

Then sell it as a "Surface Pro 30 GB (tablet only)", not "Surface Pro 64 GB (tablet only)": http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/productI...

But... that's dishonest. The hardware is a 64GB SSD. I would be very confused if they did that. I am looking at this from a modder/techie perspective, where the hardware is more important to me than the software. In a fully closed appliance, it may be different.

This isn't standard. In fact, I don't know of a single device manufacturer that does this. Every iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows desktop, Windows laptop, Microsoft tablet, and Android tablets I am aware of states the total storage space as the primary indicator of storage. Do you have any counterexamples?

A 64GB iPad has 57GB available storage space, that’s 10% less than the name suggests. A 64GB Surface Pro has 30GB available storage space, that’s less than half of what’s advertised.

When shopping for tablets, consumers should compare the 64GB Surface Pro with the 32GB iPad.

But that's a different argument. You're arguing that there is some line that can't be crossed, like perhaps manufacturers can be up to 10% off in their advertised storage space. That's a reasonable argument in itself (although where to draw that line is tricky), but it's a much different argument than "all manufacturers should advertise only the available storage space."

Because it's never been done that way, so why should they advertise a lower amount? Most people don't care.

Well, you can reclaim disk space quite easily.

We can, but will most consumers? Will they even know a ‘64GB tablet’ doesn’t have 64GB of storage space? Do they know that their OS choice influences how much free space their tablet will have?

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?

This is a general Android thing, not a Samsung thing. It has to do with the way Honeycomb and above handle internal storage and external SD cards. It just doesn't come up that often because so few new phones have SD card slots anymore.

The 16GB is generally formatted to be a 2GB OS partition where apps normally go, and you can use the "USB Drive" partition of the 16GB to move apps to. Not as bad as it sounds - haven't run out of space on my S2 yet, but you might have to move things around.

I don't know about not being able to install apps on microSD at all, but as a Gingerbread user, I find an awful lot of apps simply refuse to install on the SD card and must use the internal memory, which sucks, considering there is very little of it on my budget Samsung phone.

Doesn't that almost completely defeat the point of adding an SD card?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd be interested in knowing how much of that is android vs Samsung's crapware.

The system partition is 2GB on my 16GB Nexus 4

this is similar to ISP's claiming: Unlimited Internet/Download, and still saying "subject to Fair Usage Policy"

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.

My friend was actually asking my opinion the other day, I would tell him to choose Iphone5

you are aware that Apple devices are advertised exactly the same way right?

You're aware that a 16GB Apple device has far more than 8 GB of usable space right?

That didn't remotely answer his point.

His point was: "Why recommend Apple when they do the same thing?"

Your point about them using less space is irrelevant when the OP was taking issue with the very principle of misleading consumers with inflated storage claims.

A 16GB iPhone 5 has 13.6GB available storage space. That’s 15% less than the name suggests. If a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S4 has 8GB of available storage space, then that’s half of what’s being advertised.

I’d say that’s quite a difference.

For those apple-phobic, how much does the HTC1 16GB have available? In fact, this would be a meaningful comparison - a battle of the Android skins as it were.

The HTC One is only available at the 32GB and 64GB sizes. They skipped the 16GB size.

Perhaps this was the proper thing to do given the large system memory usage for the S4 (and presumably the HTC One).

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).

Who needs more than 8GB? /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com