The question you should ask when buying a phone

Watchdog is a popular television program on the BBC here in the UK. It exposes scams, rogue traders, shoddy service by companies, conmen and more. You can find it on the BBC's website here or watch it on iPlayer (I'm not sure if it is limited to UK residents or not, try it and see).

A recent programme featured the Samsung Galaxy S4 and it was basically airing a few people's complaints about the lack of memory on the new phone, asking Samsung where all the memory has gone. One user featured on the programme had an S2 or S3, I can't remember which, and when he upgraded to Samsung's latest and greatest gadget he couldn't install all his apps and music. He was complaining that the phone lacked the memory that it was advertised to have.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with 16GB of memory of course, but you should not ask how much memory is installed as this isn't that relevant. What is important of course, and what you should ask before buying a phone is how much memory is available. On the S4 you get the latest version of Android and on top of that, Samsung adds quite a bundle of software. It actually reduces the amount of free memory to around 9GB on a 16GB phone.

This is a little disappointing, but if you want a phone that is packed with features then the software is going to take up a fair bit of space. It is inevitable. However, Samsung could have made the situation a bit better by installing regular apps that could easily be uninstalled to free up space should the user not want them. All regular apps from the Google Play store have uninstall options, but Samsung's don't. Instead of an Uninstall option, you get an Uninstall Updates option. There is also some duplication of software too, so there is a Google Calendar and a Samsung S Planner app, which actually displays your Google Calendar, a Music player when Google Play Music is also installed, and a Samsung Apps Store when there's Google Play Store.

I thought it was a bit unfair to feature the Samsung Galaxy S4 on such a program. It's not a scam, fault, rip-off or bad service like the other items covered in the programme. The high memory usage by the system is just a fact of life really. There are rumours that there is a version of the S4 coming out this summer with plain vanilla Android. That could be interesting and the free memory could be as much as 13GB without the Samsung bloat.

The S4 isn't the only device with memory issues that has come to light and the operating system on the Microsoft Surface tablet uses a lot of memory too. On a 32GB Surface you will be lucky to get half that for your programs, photos, videos and music.

The question you should ask when buying a device is not how much memory is installed, but how much is available to use.