Which? magazine, known for its comparisons meant to help consumers with picking electronics, has published a new study of sorts that aims to debunk how much internal storage left-over you actually get with 8 popular smartphones. As many of you have come to expect, smartphones are usually marketed as carrying an option of 16/32/64GB internal memory, and yet a very sizable portion of that promise is actually taken up by the operating system itself, along with all of its fluff. As you can imagine, this is a particularly annoying issue when you get your hands on a carrier-branded model, which usually comes with an unhealthy dose of non-removable bloatware. So how much is there left for you, if you look at your typical 16GB device?
Well, according to the folks behind Which?, the answer is simple: Samsung's heavy TouchWiz gets the 'award' for the most bloated piece of firmware, and its Galaxy S4 is, accordingly, able to store about half of its advertised capacity. The rest of the smartphones on the list are fairly close together, offering from 10 to a little over 12GB of usable storage, with the iPhone 5c getting the crown, with 12.6GB of available memory.
Now, lest you cry foul, we actually double-checked some of the results ourselves, and largely arrived at the same numbers, with very little variation. The reason for this actually simple: the folks behind the blog are UK-based, so their regional models come pre-loaded with a different sort of bloatware.
Chris Panayotov is a former mobile tech reviewer of phones, tablets and wearables at PhoneArena. However, his contribution to PhoneArena content includes not just reviews, but all kinds of regular and experimental features, such as news stories, buying guides, and an exclusive column on the most notable phones out of Asia.
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