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It’s become an industry expectation to have less available storage than what’s advertised on the box, but we’re not sure the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua’s case can be excused. The phone apparently comes with just 1.26GB of usable storage out of 8GB.
8GB of storage isn’t a lot by today’s standard, mind you, but it should be enough to have at least 4GB of freely available storage, if not more. According to the storage analysis on Android 5.0, the phone’s system is taking up roughly 4GB alone, while pre-installed apps account for over 2GB.
Even more damning is the fact that the device’s user manual suggests there should be as much as 3GB of usable storage, which is double of what is actually available (but still a pretty pathetic expectation). Some will point out that you can expand storage thanks to the device’s microSD card slot, but that does nothing for things that can only be placed on internal storage such as apps and cache.
The crime here isn’t that the phone has 8GB of storage. It’s a budget phone that will naturally come up short in this area. The problem is Sony (and probably Google with all of the apps these companies are required to include as part of their Android license) are not doing proper optimization of their user experience to give as much of that storage to users as they can, and we hope they’ll address it in a future software upgrade. We’ll be reaching out to the company for a comment on whether this is an error, and whether they have plans to eradicate it at some point.
[via XperiaBlog]
eeew.
And my aunt just replaced her iPhone with this ?
This phone is going to leave a bad taste in her mouth about Android then
It’s sad that people replace iPhones with non-flagship android phones. They’re bound to hate android if they do that. It’s not even fair, lol.
I agree, I recently had a friend thinking of making the switch and I recommended only flagship devices. To have done otherwise would have been a disservice.
the whole point of buying Android is getting more for less, this is just getting less for less.
Your poor aunt. I feel really bad for her, hope she is still in grace period for a return.
Why would you even allow that? It’s what keeps people off our OS.
I hardly speak to her tbh, I was told by my mother ?
You get what you pay for sometimes… Sony should still be ashamed to sell this product that way.
Android on my Moto X takes up over 5GB, then apps are about 2GB. 8GB is not enough.
It probrably depends on the carrier. Whatever carrier put 2 gigs of preloaded apps on this phone took up a lot of the generically advertised by the manufacturer, 3+ gigs available on the phone.
Exactly my thought when I read that.
The trend is only going to worsen.
Everyone is clamoring for 64-bit Android – that requires a much larger /system partition than the 32-bit version.
ART precompiles apps – those need to use storage as well.
There’s an easy solution… don’t make devices with only 8GB of storage. 16GB should be the absolute minimum for cheapy devices, mid-ranges devices should have at least 32GB, and high-end devices should have at least 64GB or 32GB + sd card slot.
Flash memory is cheap these days, there’s no excuse for manufacturers to skimp on it.
They should also keep bloatware to a minimum. The whole Superfish debacle should have taught manufacturers a lesson about just throwing in as much bloatware as they can get paid to include.
I’d say that 32GB rather than 16GB needs to be the absolute minimum these days.
it started with letting companies advertise and sell hard drives as 1GB when they only had 1000MB…should’ve nipped the deceptive data practices in the bud from the jump…you give them an inch they take a yard…companies should be required to display ACTUAL amount of data the END USER will have available to them not some marketing department contrivation…
Just had this exact conversation the other day when buying a few flash drives. Advertised as 16GB, but really only 16,0000MB instead of 16384MB. Since the time Ive been working with PCs its always been 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024. Miss the days when it was easier.
Its bad enough you lose space when formatting the HDD, now you get this garbage.
Actually, RAM has been base 2 e.g 1KB = 1024Bytes where as Hard storage such as Hard Disks have been 1KB = 1000Bytes. This was because most people didn’t really care that 1KB of ram was actually 1024B but when they looked at there hard drive they expected 1000B per K.
Flash drives behave just like Hard Drives.
The ability to remove defaut-ly installed apps has never been as prevalent.
Sony, just give up already. That is a trick straight out of Lenovo or the no-name Chinese manufacturers’ playbook. Sad to see them fall to such a state. I remember years ago when the Sony name was a guarantee of quality specs & components.
I’ve got 400+ apps on my phone. I’m trying to understand how you can start out with 2 GB of apps.
From the source article – the largest app is Facebook – and they could delete that along with others.
Delete = not baked in, just pre-installed.
The source article did not say if the phone would have 3 GB available for apps after a factory data reset.
Pitchforks may not be required.
Most average users won’t do any of that.
As long as it has SD card support
That doesn’t help. you can’t put apps on sd card anymore unless you root.
It was a joke
Plus who doesn’t root anymore
Ouch…
Totally agree. DONT come from apple to a £100 android device and expect anywhere near the same quality and/or experience. I think until many more people become comfortable with cloud storage device on board storage will always be an issue. It really is a car off ” you get what you pay for ” when it comes to storage options on android devices.
WTF?! I had slightly more than that free on the 4Gb on my LG Tribute out of the box. Specs say 1.46, actual was 1.33 but after Virgin update it dropped to ~1.26.
I wonder when manufacturers will realize that not making customers aware of the actual memory capacity, frustrates them so much that they arent even willing to try out the company’s next rendition.
What a joke.
Lots of apps can’t be moved to SD. Only with root, and even with root a little bit stays on our internal memory. I never liked to root my devices, for those who do it, probably not able to root for a long time, since de most our warranty. Disgusting.
FAIL!
And this is why Sony will never be able to rival Samsung in the android world. Its gonna be LG v Samsung forever at this rate