As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and advertised internal storage capacities for mobile devices. Manufacturers misrepresenting usable space on devices is a trick with a long and storied history, but Sony’s Xperia M4 Aqua is the most shameless fakery I’ve ever seen.
As spotted by XperiaBlog, the 8GB version of the mid-range M4 Aqua has 1.26GB of space for users, once you take firmware, pre-installed apps and Android into account. That means you get 15.75 per cent of the advertised space — so, the same as buying a six-pack of beer, and receiving one lousy bottle’s worth of booze.
For this particular phone, you could argue that it’s not the end of the world — despite the pitiful amount of internal space, you can at least expand with a microSD card. But that’s far from a perfect solution — and, more to the point, it’s bullshit that your brand-new smartphone comes with less memory than an iPod Shuffle.
It also speaks to a larger problem for Android, a smartphone platform often praised for its robust offering of cheap-and-cheerful handsets. On the M4 Aqua, Android takes up 4GB of space — half the room! The M4 Aqua’s specs are pretty on-par for a mid-range smartphone; with China churning out cut-price Android handsets by the containerload, storage space — and how much Android consumes — could become a major problem.