Earlier this month we talked a bit about Samsung and the fact that it had raised the ire of some owners of the Galaxy S 4 and a BBC television program in the UK called Watchdog. The problem is that if you purchase a 16 GB Galaxy S 4 smartphone, you end up with about half of that promised storage space available to you as soon as you open the box. The reason is a huge amount of software that comes preinstalled on the smartphone.
Samsung maintains that the preinstalled software is required to give users the high-end features that they expect on a modern smartphone. However, Samsung is now reportedly reconsidering its stance on gobbling up so much storage space with preinstalled software. Samsung said that it would try and compress the software that it installs on your device into a smaller amount of storage space.
Reducing how much space preinstalled software requires would allow users access to more storage than they have currently. The problem with Samsung using half the available storage space by default is that it significantly limits the number of applications a user can install to their device. The Galaxy S 4 does have a memory card slot, but that memory card slot can only be used to store photos and other similar content.
Apps can only be stored to the internal storage available on the phone. Considering the many high-end video game apps check-in at around 1 GB, users can quickly consume all of the available space. The fact that the S 4 comes with so much software preinstalled doesn’t appear to be slowing sales.
Samsung noted recently that it had set an internal record for units shipped with the S 4. At the Google I/O conference this week, the announcement was also made that a version of the Galaxy S 4 without the Samsung TouchWiz user interface will be offered. That should mean that particular version of the smartphone has more storage space than others.
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software preinstalled doesn’t appear to be slowing sales.
Samsung noted recently that it had set an internal record for units shipped with the S 4
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I hope you know how grammatically and factually far that statement is from correct… “shipped” units do not equal “sales”, and what is worse is the S4 is actually selling extremely badly. so you don’t even have the gist of the story correct.
and good luck finding actual “sales” because Samsung has always been embarrassed by the amount of the sales of the phones that actually are smartphones… so they never actually come forward with actual unit sales.
so what info do you have to show that it is selling poorly? I know a few people that have already gotten one. I also know a bunch that want one. To be honest the bloat is only a minor issue when you can add extra storage
get rid of some of the carrier bloatware =att
There is no reason to preinstall that software at all; Samsung could make it available through the market. After three Galaxy phones, I didn’t buy the S4 because of Samsung’s software bloat.
This is part of the reason why Nexus phones will always be superior in my opinion.
I got a nexus 4 about 5 weeks ago loved the phone but when I set it up with all my stuff I had less than 2 gigs of storage left. I had the phone for 2 days and it bugged the hell out of me. Thankfully there was an issue with the data plan and tmobile thought it was the phone so they gave me a credit. At first it bummed me out because I wanted a nexus 4 to match my nexus 7. But the next day they announced the Samsung S4. for basically the same price per month to own the phone I knew this was going to be my phone because I loved the fact that 64gb sd card was not to much money and would hold all the stuff I wanted to put on there with plenty of room to grow into the phone. Vs the Nexus 4 was fixed at 16gb almost full and no room to add anything
Very nicely written. Thanks for the feedback