Samsung’s Galaxy S4, the 16 GB model, has less than 8.5 GB of free storage after a factory reset according to C|Net UK. They asked Samsung why that’s the case. Here’s their answer:

“For the Galaxy S4 16 GB model, approximately 6.85 GB occupies the system part of internal memory, which is 1 GB bigger than that of the Galaxy S3, in order to provide a high resolution display and more powerful features to our consumers. To offer the ultimate mobile experience to our users, Samsung provides a microSD slot on Galaxy S4 for extension of memory.”

Well there you go. The GS4 is storage constrainted because of the new “powerful” features that Samsung wrote in order for you to enjoy the “ultimate mobile experience” of their device. Sigh. Now granted, they’re correct to point out that there’s a microSD card slot in the GS4, but I wonder how many people will take advantage of that?

I know from personal experience that as soon as I shoved a 64 GB microSD card into my Note II, all the photos I took from there on out ended up on the card instead of on the system disk. That’s great. Where the limited storage becomes a problem is when you start talking about applications. Games these days are huge, and they’re only going to get bigger because the assets (textures, bitmaps, etc.) need to support 1080p displays.

There’s also the whole streaming music thing. Some people like to cache tracks for offline playback. Unfortunately you can’t select where those songs go because of the need for DRM.

At the end of the day, I’ll offer the same advice to Samsung that I offer to HTC: Just make it super easy for people to strip your devices of preloaded software. Back when I used to own a PC, the first thing I did after taking it out of the box was to throw on a fresh install of Windows. I’d love it if I could put an app on my Samsung phone that would download a stock version of Android, reboot the phone, and then install it.

Why can’t this happen?