It is common knowledge at this point that the advertised amount of space on a phone is not truly the amount that you can access and use. Typically, we see that around 3-4GB of memory is taken up my the system OS and a little more by apps that are pre-installed on your device, most of which is just bloatware. The nice round numbers that are announced, like 16GB or 32GB, state the size of the internal memory, not the amount usable. Knowing this, a major complaint with the Galaxy lines, and most Samsung devices in general, is that due to the bloat involved with TouchWiz, the amount of usable space is reduced even more. The Galaxy S4 was given a lot of pain over the fact that it used almost 7GB for system files and whatnot, leaving just a little more than half the advertised amount of storage accessible to the user.
This was a major fear with the Galaxy S5 as well. In fact, not too long ago a report arose that said the available storage on the S5 was in fact lower than that available on the S4, which was a bit ridiculous. Thankfully it was revealed that the S5 that was examined had an extra 2.33GB of demo content on board that will not be on the official versions of the phone. In case you were wondering, they do this at conferences and even in basic retail stores in order to show off the fun features that you are paying for, assuming we ever find out just how much we’ll be paying. With that extra 2.33GB in account, the total amount of available storage on the S5 comes in at just around 10.7GB, which is an improvement in respect to the S4. Of course, devices that stick closer to stock Android like the Nexus line use up much less memory, but the trade off for Samsung’s multitude of features must be taken into consideration, if you like that sort of thing.
Internal storage is always an iffy thing for me… my paranoia tends to kick in that I will run out of space. While that has yet to come true with my Nexus 5 32GB, now that I’ve started doing native backups and flashing ROMs, I see my available storage start to decrease. Samsung’s trump over Google, in my opinion, is that they still let you use expandable memory. Samsung made this even more useful by letting us transfer apps to the external storage and run them from there, a feature not available on stock Android. What do you think about this? Is Samsung’s amount of bloat too much, or will you be using the many features that this phone has available? Let us know down below in the comments!