How much storage space does your 16GB smartphone really have?

Last year, customers who bought Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablets found out that their 64GB tablet had only 23GB free storage space, just 36% percent of the advertised storage space. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go down too well with customers. 

When it comes to smartphones like the iPhone, 16GB models are quite popular as it is the entry level model. So the question is how much storage space does your 16GB phone have? Folks at the Which? magazine ran tests on eight popular 16GB smartphones to find out the answer to that question.

They’ve created the following infographic, which shows how much free storage is there in top smartphones available currently.

So as you can see, Samsung’s flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with the least amount of free storage space. It has just 8.56GB or just 54% of the advertised storage space.

iPhone 5c, Nexus 5 and iPhone 5stook the top honors with 12.60GB, 12.28GB and 12.20GB respectively. While it is understandable that some of the space is occupied by the operating system that is required to run the device, Which? magazine found that in some cases unwanted bloatware and system files occupy 46 per cent of the phone’s internal storage.

The problem is more acute with Android based devices, as carriers are also allowed to install apps before selling devices to customers. The problem is that customers are not allowed to remove some of the unnecessary or unwanted apps from their smartphones include the iPhone.

However, as the Which? magazine points out, the three smartphones that offer the most amount of storage space don’t have memory card slots, so they can’t be expanded like Galaxy S4.

So does it really matter how much free storage space is available on smartphone, especially if they’ve memory card slots? I think it does, as I felt a little cheated when I found that I got only 54% of the advertised storage space on my Samsung Galaxy S4. I must also admit that I was disappointed to find out that I just got 76% of the advertised storage space on my iPhone 5s. It would be nice if the smartphone vendors gave customers an easy way to delete the bloatware.