Only 1.26GB of the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua’s 8GB of storage are usable

It’s become an industry expectation to have less available storage than what’s advertised on the box, but we’re not sure the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua’s case can be excused. The phone apparently comes with just 1.26GB of usable storage out of 8GB.

8GB of storage isn’t a lot by today’s standard, mind you, but it should be enough to have at least 4GB of freely available storage, if not more. According to the storage analysis on Android 5.0, the phone’s system is taking up roughly 4GB alone, while pre-installed apps account for over 2GB.

Even more damning is the fact that the device’s user manual suggests there should be as much as 3GB of usable storage, which is double of what is actually available (but still a pretty pathetic expectation). Some will point out that you can expand storage thanks to the device’s microSD card slot, but that does nothing for things that can only be placed on internal storage such as apps and cache.

The crime here isn’t that the phone has 8GB of storage. It’s a budget phone that will naturally come up short in this area. The problem is Sony (and probably Google with all of the apps these companies are required to include as part of their Android license) are not doing proper optimization of their user experience to give as much of that storage to users as they can, and we hope they’ll address it in a future software upgrade. We’ll be reaching out to the company for a comment on whether this is an error, and whether they have plans to eradicate it at some point.

[via XperiaBlog]