When the Galaxy S4 launched earlier this year, one thing many consumers were not fond of was the lack of internal storage available. The 16GB Galaxy S4 variant shipped with just over 9GB of space available to the user, while the rest of the room was taken up by TouchWiz and pre-installed apps, also known as bloatware. On Thursday, however, Samsung finally started rolling out an update to the Galaxy S4 carrying the GT-I9505, which is the version packing a Snapdragon 600 processor, that half-way solves the issues surrounding available storage space on the device.
Samsung has started rolling out an update to the Galaxy S4 GT-I9505, though right now, the update only seems to be hitting devices in Germany at the moment. The company is expected to roll the update out to more markets very soon, however. The biggest change in this update appears to be the new ability to install apps to the SD card and run them from there as opposed to having to install them on the limited internal storage. While this may not be useful for the tiny apps that are only a few megabytes, it will definitely be helpful for the graphic intensive games that are well over 1GB big.
Other changes in the removal of the smearing issue, which caused users to see purple effects while scrolling. The full change log is as follows:
- New Camera firmware
- Smart Pause Toggle
- HDR Video (can now record HDR video)
- Semi-transparent status bar
- New Icons in the Settings
- Increase in display legibility
- Secure boot status (About Phone)
The update is rolling out now in Germany, though is expected to come to other markets soon. It weighs in at 356.67MB and is available over-the-air and via Samsung’s Kies software on the desktop. It keeps the device on Android version 4.2.2 and is only available to the Snapdragon powered model right now, but is expected to roll-out to the Exynos models soon.
Be sure to let us know when you see the update hit your device and what changes you notice. We’re hoping there’s a fix for the bug causing bad lag, but it doesn’t look like it is in this update.