Smartphone manufacturers often mislead consumers by advertising more internal storage than actually available, but the Sony Xperia X4 Aqua takes the cake.
The 8 GB variant of the Sony Xperia X4 Aqua just made its global debut and brought a big surprise: the handset has just 1.26 GB of storage space actually available to users.
More specifically, the Xperia M4 Aqua does indeed pack 8 GB of internal storage capacity, but its firmware, pre-installed applications and the Android OS take up the vast majority of that space. Consequently, users get less than 16 percent of the advertised storage.
The folks over at the Xperia Blog have obtained the European E2303 retail version of the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. As the publication notes, this model is a SIM-free version that should in fact come with less bloatware compared with carrier versions of the device. The E2303 runs firmware build 26.1.A.1.100, and the meager available storage is without installing any apps. If the SIM-free version comes with this little storage, one can't help but wonder what the carrier versions have left.
"Out of 8 GB of storage, 4 GB is taken up by Android 5.0 and just over 2 GB of pre-installed apps. For our model, this leaves a paltry 1.26 GB for our own apps, media, photos and videos," the Xperia Blog points out.
The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua raised plenty of interest since its debut, as it comes as a mid-range smartphone with good specifications, proper waterproofing and a decent price tag. The handset does offer microSD support to expand its storage capacity, but adding external memory doesn't fix the fact that Sony advertises 8 GB of storage and leaves just 1.26 GB for the user. Even cheap music players have more storage than that, and this issue could significantly affect the commercial success of the Xperia M4 Aqua.
At the same time, this issue also raises awareness regarding a bigger problem stemming from Android itself. Google's popular mobile platform takes up a whopping 4 GB of storage on the Xperia M4 Aqua. Occupying half the total storage of a device only with Android is far from ideal, and the OS' notable storage needs could become a serious issue.
Sony Xperia M4 Aqua users can't even delete all unwanted apps to free up more space on the device, as most apps are baked in so users can't uninstall them. Some apps can be uninstalled but don't free up much space. According to the Xperia Blog, deleting Facebook, Kobo Books, AVG and other unwanted apps freed up only 470 MB of space, which still left the handset with just 1.73 GB of storage. Installing some additional apps such as Skype, Dropbox, SwiftKey and others would quickly gobble up all that space, so the Xperia M4 Aqua is basically compromised in terms of internal storage.
