Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S 4 has already been met with some criticism over the size of available memory in the 16GB version. When all is said and done, the smartphone only has around 8GB of usable storage. Samsung spoke to CNET UK and defended the limited usable storage and offered microSD memory card support as the answer.

“For the Galaxy S4 16GB model, approximately 6.85GB occupies [the] system part of internal memory, which is 1GB bigger than that of the Galaxy S3, in order to provide [a] high resolution display and more powerful features to our consumers.”

“To offer the ultimate mobile experience to our users, Samsung provides [a] microSD slot on Galaxy S4 for extension of memory.”

In my estimation, Samsung should then consider selling this device as an 8GB model if that’s all the available internal memory a customer can use for downloadable applications. Sure, media files can go on any microSD card and that’s fine, but I’m concerned about the amount of space available for applications and 8GB can be a real problem.

I get that all smartphones and pretty much all devices including computers, tablets and the like don’t have the true amount of available memory that is listed. This was a hard lesson Microsoft Surface owners learned earlier this year when the 64GB version of the Surface Pro only had 23GB of usable space. Still, when I buy a device I don’t believe I should be stuck with the half the memory I believed I would have available. I’m sure someone, somewhere is already preparing a “false advertisement” argument.

What do you think? Should Samsung market this as an 8GB model or continue offering it as 16GB internal memory.

CNET UK