Galaxy S4 Storage Controversy Televised, Samsung Reviews

[fulle]

Part of the issue is that the SII and the SIII had 11.5, and 11.35 GB of space available, around 71% of the advertised space, and the S4 has 8.8 GB free, or about 55%.
If I was an SII owner upgrading to an S4, I'd be surprised to be missing an additional 2.7GB of storage space. It's not a huge heal, considering the phone has a MicroSD slot, but sheesh. That's a LOT of bloatware on there!
I wish it became standard that available storage space must be listed alongside storage space numbers. What the industry is currently doing IS misleading.

 

[IndignantSkeptic]

They can't really list available space because the space used by the OS can keep changing every time it is patched.

 

[redeemer]

Here the thing there is lag on the S4, the firmware update help a bit. Secondly the plastics used with its "Hyper Glaze" makes your hands feel greasy. Now I appreciated the Touchwiz, features and enhancements but seriously the OS image is huge. We cannot even install apps on the SD card. My music is on the cloud and I stream my movies, so I absolutely have no use for SD storage. I returned my S4 for an HTC One never looked back.

It looks like HTC can only afford to outsource their online smear campaign to Chinese firms. If HTC wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy, maybe they could afford people to spew this dribble who could actually use proper sentence structure.

Maybe if HTC worried about what was on the inside of their phones as much as they worried about the exterior that gets covered with a case anyway, they wouldn't be getting ready to go out of business.

Funny thing is I do not care about the a company financial position, just want a solid device. The HTC One in case you have been living under a rock has been thrashing the S4 in reviews. Unfortunately for HTC they only have the phone business, unlike Samsung. Samsung plays dirty man you know this this is why they owe Apple millions and even their CEO was charged with corruption!

 

[ismaeljrp]

I think It should become mandatory for companies to only advertise , free available storage space. Not total storage. Not everyone understands storage lingo , especially a device catered to the mainstream, which are the least geeky.

 

[4745454b]

as far as I can tell, Samsung never advertised 16GB (or whatever the size) of AVAILABLE storage.

And this would be my problem. Again, we expect some to be missing. But when was the last time you bought something and got around half?

 

[flaxx]

The iPhone 16GB only has 10GB of space for you to install Apps and put in Media files, while it's storage is completely non-expandable.....................
Now tell me...........why is this not an issue with the iFone, Other Android Phones or even Windows phones?

I'll tell you why, it's cuz you're talking out of your ass and making up numbers. The iPhone 5 has somewhere between 13 and 14gb free (depending on exact version of iOS 6) which is roughly 50% more storage than Samsuck's GS4 16gb. Get a Nexus if you're gonna be a fandroid.

 

[patrick3876]

It's like you buy and pay for 16 gallons of gasoline but only get 8.

Your analogy is wrong. You bought a phone with 16GB of flash memory. If I disassemble the phone will I find a 16GB flash memory chip in it? Yes. So I got 16GB, what I paid for. They are misleading however that they do not advertise that the OS takes up 8GB. But remember they were talking about the phone's physical specs. They said it has 16GB of flash memory, not that 16GB is available. Feel free to erase the entire 16GB chip yourself and find some other way to have the phone work that doesn't use the internal 16GB (i.e. use a different OS or write your own OS that can run off a microSD card) so you can have the full internal 16GB free for storage.

Now, there is a long tradition of delivering less storage space than advertised when it comes to hard drives which to a large part is due to the 2^n "confusion" and also to a considerable part due to the need to reserve some of the storage space for file system data such as the MBR, partition table, meta-data etc. As an educated buyer with a lot of space for hard drives in the computer case and a wide selection of large hard drives we have learned to accept this and compensate whenever it is necessary, even though I wouldn't say this is OK either.

On the contrary, this is perfectly okay. Once again, did the hard drive manufacturer ship out a drive capable of holding 1TB of binary data? Yes. Is the MBR, partition table, etc. the responsibility of the hard drive manufacturer? No. It is the responsibility of the File System. For example, the NTFS file system for Windows is made by Microsoft, so you should be blaming Microsoft for making a file system that requires a partition table, file allocation table, etc. Once again, feel free to use a different file system or code your own that does not require these things and you can use the entire 1TB without losing anything to file allocation tables. Again you got the exact piece of hardware that you paid for.

This is a non-issue with chip based memory such as RAM. If you buy 4GB of RAM this is what you get (and not some stinking 3.67GB or something along those lines).

You are contradicting yourself with what you are saying about phone and hard drive storage above. According to what you said about phone storage and hard drive storage, RAM would also be a issue. For example, if you buy 4GB of RAM and your system needs to reserve 256MB for on-board video, are you going to blame the RAM manufacturer too?

The major issue here is that the average user doesn't understand what software does to the hardware specs. You bought and got in physical hardware what you paid for. Plain and simple, end of story.

That does not mean however that I am in agreement with Samsung though. They could be more transparent and tell you that only 8GB is available but they didn't lie to you when they said it has 16GB of flash memory without referring to how much would actually be free.

 

[w0_od]

as someone said below, Sansun could have easily swallowed a tiny, neglible hit on the bottom line by starting at 24 gb storage and marketing it as 16 gb etc
but i guess in their rush to mine the riches they forgot to think as consumers

 

[kartu]

Yeah, it sucks. But all that rage towards phone WITH EXPANSION SLOT AVAILABLE, when others, with only built-in memory, are somehow OK, since they it less than a half, is not fair.

 

[Grandmastersexsay]

Here the thing there is lag on the S4, the firmware update help a bit. Secondly the plastics used with its "Hyper Glaze" makes your hands feel greasy. Now I appreciated the Touchwiz, features and enhancements but seriously the OS image is huge. We cannot even install apps on the SD card. My music is on the cloud and I stream my movies, so I absolutely have no use for SD storage. I returned my S4 for an HTC One never looked back.

It looks like HTC can only afford to outsource their online smear campaign to Chinese firms. If HTC wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy, maybe they could afford people to spew this dribble who could actually use proper sentence structure.

Maybe if HTC worried about what was on the inside of their phones as much as they worried about the exterior that gets covered with a case anyway, they wouldn't be getting ready to go out of business.

Funny thing is I do not care about the a company financial position, just want a solid device. The HTC One in case you have been living under a rock has been thrashing the S4 in reviews. Unfortunately for HTC they only have the phone business, unlike Samsung. Samsung plays dirty man you know this this is why they owe Apple millions and even their CEO was charged with corruption!

The reviews are done by retards who care more what the phone looks like on the outside than how it performs.

The S4 has been destroying the HTC One in every single benchmark. The reviews don't mention that. All they seem to care about is that the HTC One's back is made out of Aluminum, like it is some exotic substance. They fail to mention that by using plastic, Samsung was able to make a back cover that was removable, allowing for expandable storage and a replaceable battery. The idiot reviews also seem to fail to mention damn near everyone puts a case on their phone. They also forget to point out that plastic has better impact resistance than aluminum.

As soon as a reviewer mentions the HTC One being better made, he/she loses all credibility. They lack the common sense to realize that throwing a metal exterior on a glued together phone does not mean it is well made. The S4 trounces the HTC One in reparability tests.


Maybe we should just let the sales figures decide which is the better phone.

 

[Grandmastersexsay]

as someone said below, Sansun could have easily swallowed a tiny, neglible hit on the bottom line by starting at 24 gb storage and marketing it as 16 gb etc
but i guess in their rush to mine the riches they forgot to think as consumers

Ugh...

While your heart is bleeding all over the floor, you seem to be forgetting that Samsung is a business whose goal is to make as big a profit as possible.

 

[oj88]

Samsung's (or industry-wise) practice is ripping consumers off, and it is NOT OK, IMO.
Take PC industry as an example, The BIOS flash is stand-alone. The OS hardly occupies more than 10% of the disk space. And if the disk space is full, you can always clone the smaller disk to a larger one. Now tell me what you can do with a smart phone when the flash memory is used up? Buy a new one?

 

[redeemer]

Here the thing there is lag on the S4, the firmware update help a bit. Secondly the plastics used with its "Hyper Glaze" makes your hands feel greasy. Now I appreciated the Touchwiz, features and enhancements but seriously the OS image is huge. We cannot even install apps on the SD card. My music is on the cloud and I stream my movies, so I absolutely have no use for SD storage. I returned my S4 for an HTC One never looked back.

It looks like HTC can only afford to outsource their online smear campaign to Chinese firms. If HTC wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy, maybe they could afford people to spew this dribble who could actually use proper sentence structure.

Maybe if HTC worried about what was on the inside of their phones as much as they worried about the exterior that gets covered with a case anyway, they wouldn't be getting ready to go out of business.

Funny thing is I do not care about the a company financial position, just want a solid device. The HTC One in case you have been living under a rock has been thrashing the S4 in reviews. Unfortunately for HTC they only have the phone business, unlike Samsung. Samsung plays dirty man you know this this is why they owe Apple millions and even their CEO was charged with corruption!

The reviews are done by retards who care more what the phone looks like on the outside than how it performs.

The S4 has been destroying the HTC One in every single benchmark. The reviews don't mention that. All they seem to care about is that the HTC One's back is made out of Aluminum, like it is some exotic substance. They fail to mention that by using plastic, Samsung was able to make a back cover that was removable, allowing for expandable storage and a replaceable battery. The idiot reviews also seem to fail to mention damn near everyone puts a case on their phone. They also forget to point out that plastic has better impact resistance than aluminum.

As soon as a reviewer mentions the HTC One being better made, he/she loses all credibility. They lack the common sense to realize that throwing a metal exterior on a glued together phone does not mean it is well made. The S4 trounces the HTC One in reparability tests.


Maybe we should just let the sales figures decide which is the better phone.

So your such a HC Samsung fan that you would call 90% of the pro HTC One reviews out there retarded?? I do not repair phones I send them off to technicians I also pick up extra protection warranty, I mean these are $700 devices! The fact that you mention benchmarks hurts your credibility, the S4 does score higher but has lag? The HTC One has no lag whatsoever.

I think you need to see this http://mashable.com/2013/04/29/galaxy-s4-drop-test/

 

[AndrewMD]

The problem is that with Samsung's S4, you cannot remove the applications that are installed without rooting the device or installing a custom rom. When trying to use the case of Microsoft or Apple, neither of these companies install "bloatware" on to their devices. I do believe that Samsung needs to address the issue at hand, be upfront about how much usable space is available to the customer. Ideally, I would like Samsung to provide an update that makes all of the bloatware optional installed.
Currently I am using an S3 and I do not use most of the bloatware apps that are installed on it. They are just sitting there taking up space and icon space as I scroll through my list of "installed" apps,,,,

 

[threehosts]

It's like you buy and pay for 16 gallons of gasoline but only get 8.

Your analogy is wrong....

Now, there is a long tradition of delivering less storage space than advertised when it comes to hard drives which to a large part is due to the 2^n "confusion"

On the contrary, this is perfectly okay. Once again, did the hard drive manufacturer ship out a drive capable of holding 1TB of binary data? Yes. ... It is the responsibility of the File System. ...

Um, no. You should go and read up on the subject before posting your ludicracies here. The 2^n "confusion" I was talking about has nothing to do with the file system.

In the past, hard drive manufacturers and their ilk decided to establish the tradition of stating the number of megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and so on using decimal prefixes where mega is 10^6, giga is 10^9, tera is 10^12 and so on. The number is bigger so it looks like the hard drive is larger than it actually is so that's why manufacturers use it.

In the binary system, the prefixes are defined as kilo=2^10, mega=2^20, giga=2^30, tera=2^40 and so on. This convention was established due to the way the memory is addressed and is now an ubiquitous and a widely accepted measure of data capacity in computer systems.

So mixing the decimal prefixes and the binary prefixes merely complicates things needlessly. If pretty much everyone else can and are using the binary prefixes, then so can the hard drive and SSD storage manufacturers. period.