Samsung Galaxy S5 Is Another ROM Hog, Uses Nearly 8GB Of Internal Storage

The Samsung Galaxy S5 was announced Monday with a host of new features, which appear to take up a considerable amount of memory on the device.

Tech website Android Central discovered soon after the Galaxy S became official that the smartphone’s preloaded features take up approximately half of the storage capacity of the 16GB Galaxy S5.

A photo of the storage settings on a Galaxy S5 handset shows the device having 7.86GB of internal storage available with 5.28GB of the ROM dedicated to running the device’s system and another 2.33GB to run miscellaneous files. Taking into consideration that the device shown is using about 534MB of its available memory, the total available storage on the Galaxy S5, or at least on that model at least, is approximately 8.3GB.

Critics are already comparing the S5 to the Galaxy S4, which has about 8.5GB of internal storage available. Initially, users did not even have the option of making some space available by moving apps to a microSD card, but Samsung later sent out software optimization, which enabled this option. But, recent reports indicate that the Android 4.4 KitKat operating system on Samsung devices now implements a protocol, which limits the functionality of third-party apps on microSD cards. Currently, there is no word on whether the protocol affects the Galaxy S5, but it had been discovered on Galaxy S4 and Note 3 models now updating to Android 4.4.

Many note that several rival devices feature a considerably larger amount of available internal storage because they don’t include an excess of system applications. Samsung is infamous for its devices’ special features, which are what eat away at ROM rather quickly. A comparison of popular smartphones was conducted in January and discovered that Apple’s iPhone 5c had the most available space (12.60GB), followed by Google’s Nexus 5 (12.28GB); both of these devices run fairly minimal operating systems. The Samsung Galaxy S4 came in last place with just 8.56GB with its extensive list of “life companion” features.

Ironically, January reports also indicated that Samsung’s home country of South Korea is now establishing laws that will force smartphone manufacturers to make their pre-installed applications deletable. The guidelines will reportedly go into effect in April (notably when the Samsung Galaxy S5 releases), and will affect Samsung devices. ZDNet notes that the Samsung Galaxy S4 in Korea includes 80 pre-installed apps from the manufacturer, mobile carriers and Google, which develops the Android operating system that the device runs. Once these new rules are implemented, users will be able to delete at least half of those pre-installed apps. Unfortunately, such guidelines are not expected to come to other countries such as the U.S.

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