Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghiculescu | Hacker News Reader

> For the typical "mother," they aren't filling up the 8GB internal that's included.

My mother (why the quotation marks?) loves recording videos and wouldn't dream of removing them from her phone/SD, even if she imported them to her computer. Filling 8GB is very doable. She'd be thoroughly confused once she did so.

Giving power users the option of moving things around is OK, but the phone shouldn't report that it's out of space unless all the storage mechanisms (internal and SD and anything else) are actually full, as opposed to;

> Today my phone said I was out of space, but it turns out I have plenty of space, but just not in the right place.

View on HN

The 8GB in his example is internal memory, used only by the phone to store the Android system image and application packages. All user data, including videos, are stored on the SD card, external memory. The vast majority of users will never install enough applications to fill internal memory, hence the OP's point is relatively moot.

I assume the author probably bought a dirt cheap Android device that doesn't actually have a decent amount of internal memory; my original G1 for instance only had 512M of internal memory, and installing some big apps or games could quickly fill that up. Modern, powerful Android phones can have 4G or more of internal memory for installed programs, which most users will never have a problem with.

Granted, I'm not saying this still isn't confusing, but for most people it should be a non-issue because the only thing they'll care about is filling the SD card.

Thanks for clarifying for me!

Correct. All of the more recent "power" Android phones even tend to have 8GB internal.

I wonder what phone OP was using... I just checked my Droid X: 1 GB (of 16 GB) used on SD card, 2 GB (of 8G B) used on the internal.

OP here. I got the Optimus V - dirt cheap and only has 256 mb of internal memory. So, obviously this isn't representative of "modern" phones, but I'm not convinced that better hardware is a good solution to a potential design flaw.

Case in point, this phone recently went on sale at Best Buy and Target and has been sold out in every store in my city. There's a lot of new Android users that will be dealing with this problem.

What version of Android does it run? I have a similar budget phone (ZTE Blade) and this was an issue under 2.1 (I would get warnings about being low on space) but I haven't even thought about it since I went to 2.2 a while ago. I believe most larger apps install themselves automatically to the SD card now? Enough do it that it doesn't bother me anyway.

I actually have no idea how much internal space my phone has, which I take as evidence that it's not an issue for me. Google tells me it's got a shockingly small sounding 150MB of internal of memory.

Blade has 512 MB of internal memory, but it is partitioned into /system, /data and /cache. Both system and data are somewhere around 235 MB each and cache is the rest.

Android doesn't help that it warns you when you are below 10% of free /data. On Blade, it is still 23 MB.

Just out of curiosity, what are you using for 2.2 on Blade? AFAIK, the official version is still 2.1.

I'm very happily using MoDaCo custom Froyo rom:

http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blade-roms-rom-customi...

Thanks, I will have a look at it.

Wow. I didn't know they made any with that little internal memory.

Get the app "app2sd," get a 32gb SD card for ~$30, roll around in the money you saved from not getting a 32GB iPhone. ;p

But seriously, that is a flaw to license the OS out to manufacturers without making them abide to some level of minimum spec.

Yeah, I got that installed. Unfortunately, there's still quite a few apps that only install to the internal memory. I hope that will change over time.

" roll around in the money you saved from not getting a 32GB iPhone."

That's exactly what I'm doing! For all my aggravations, the phone is still great. I only paid $140 for it (contract free!) and the savings from the virgin mobile prepaid plan will pay for the phone shortly.

As for a minimum spec, I'm a little torn. If Google had imposed a minimum spec, then I wouldn't be having this problem - because I wouldn't have bought the phone and wouldn't be telling my friends what a great deal it was.

>but do I really expect someone like my mother to understand this and use it?

His usage of mother seemed to be an allusion to someone non-technical in nature, not just his mother. Therefore, I "mother" to include the more generic person he was talking about.

I think at the end of the day, you're mom is an exception. I consider myself a power user and don't even come close to the 8gb internal and 16gb sd on my phone. Most people now listen to music on the cloud, use apps like qik to post movies online, upload pictures right to facebook, etc.

Also, I think a lot of my apps save created files (like pictures and movies) to SD by default. Not sure on that. But, one of the reasons most apps write some data to internal is because it has higher security privileges.

It's not much of an argument. For some people, the easiness and out of the box nature of the iPhone is preferable. For other people, the customization abilities and expandability of the Android OS is nicer. Every one wins.

That's why recording video, camera pictures, browser downloads, app cache is being stored on the SD card. Most apps, however, get installed on the internal storage of the phone, which is usually around 1 to 1.5 GB.

Sadly, most app developers tend to ignore the SD storage option, and store all their maps, levels, save games etc on the internal phone storage. Whether this is an OS or App design fault is debatable.

"most app developers tend to ignore the SD storage option, and store all their maps, levels, save games etc on the internal phone storage. "

Is there a compelling reason why Google allows developers to make this choice?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com