Samsung Says Galaxy S 4 Software Bloat May Be Trimmed With New Firmware

Last week we mentioned that Samsung had landed itself in hot water over in the UK with a BBC consumer program called Watchdog. The television program Watchdog previously announced an investigation on Samsung's new Galaxy S 4 smartphone. The reason the BBC television show was going to investigate the smartphone was because of the amount of storage space available to users on the device.

As most buyers of software and other electronic devices know, just because the box says 16 GB of storage certainly doesn't mean you actually have that much storage to use. On the 16 GB Galaxy S 4, Samsung installs so much software that roughly half of the storage space available is consumed when the device is turned on for the first time. Samsung maintains that all the software installed on the phone is required to provide the features users expect.

Samsung is reportedly having a change of heart when it comes to its stance on using up so much the storage space on a user's new smartphone without their permission. Samsung has said in the wake of the BBC Watchdog investigation that it will try to compact the features it adds to the device into a smaller amount of storage space to get more storage for user data and applications.

Samsung also recently announced a version of the Galaxy S 4 during the Google I/O conference that will ship without the Samsung TouchWiz interface. That special Samsung user interface is one of the pieces of software that takes up memory on a new smartphone. One of the big reasons why Watchdog and some consumers are so irritated by Samsung filling up the internal storage with software is because storage space for apps is limited.

The S 4 does have a memory card slot, but users can't install applications to that memory card. The only content that can be stored on the memory card inside the phone is data like photos and music. Anyone who likes high-end mobile games knows that some come in close to the 1 GB mark and with only 8 GB of storage space not taken up by Samsung software, you can only install a few of those high-end mobile games before you're out of space for everything.

SOURCE: CNET