On Tuesday, April 8, 2014 2:40:09 AM UTC-4, The Real Bev wrote:
On 04/06/2014 02:30 PM, Danny D. wrote:



On Sun, 06 Apr 2014 12:11:55 -0700, trader_4 wrote:



Different versions are going to take up different amounts

of space. You probably don't have an apples to apples comparison

of the same phone, same apps, with one version vs another, anyway,

which would be difficult to do.



True. T-Mobile told me the same thing. To which I answered that

they only had about a score of phones, and they all get the

same software, so, it's not all that difficult a task.



It would take a technician about an hour to compile, for

the twenty odd phones that T-Mobile owns, for example.



Anyway, what T-Mobile told me was that there are twice

as many of those specs as I would have thought, simply

because they said a pre-paid phone has different software

than a post-paid phone.



They sell only a few "pre-paid" phones. Low end. I put the pre-paid

T-Mobile SIM

from my previous Nokia flipphone into the unlocked BLU Dash 4.5

smartphone and it worked right off the bat. I'm willing to buy T-Mobile

$10/year prepaid service, but not a locked-in T-Mobile branded phone.



So, in toto, how many phones does T-Mobile sell at any

one time? I'm guessing about 20. So that's 40 numbers.



All in all, it's not all that onerous to tell the customer

the truth.



It takes one tech (or maybe his 8-year-old kid) to read off the storage

numbers for all the phones they sell.

It's not just reading off numbers. It's that you have to then maintain
a current up to date list that has the actual memory available and
keep it updated each and every time the software gets changed. And
part of that change, they likely have no control over. For example,
they have a current load that includes many apps. That load probably
stays fixed for some number of months. But as soon as you buy the phone
and turn it on, any day there is a change to any of those apps, it could
and likely would change the amount of storage space the apps take.
It could go from the phone having the claimed 600MB of free space to
having 500MB of free space and then you'd have someone accusing them
of lying. It looks to me like they'd have to update that list of
free space for each phone every day to keep it accurate.



We have this nifty thing called

'communication' now. Sometimes paper, sometimes bits, but it really

works. They really have no excuse for not having that information

instantly available.


Try calling up Dell or HP and asking how much space is avaiable on their
Model XPG-S hard drive after all the software is loaded. I'll bet
they don't have the number either.

I agree they should at least put a note on the literature, something like:

"The 4GB of internal storage is also used for the OS and all pre-installed
apps. This reduces the amount of memory available to the user."

They should also put in a disclaimer that says that additional memory
that is added cannot be used to store apps.

I think if they did that, it's enough to put people fairly on notice.

But I don't agree that it makes the phone "unuseable" as Danny claims.
Did you see that list of apps he expects an entry level, $150 Android
phone to support? He bought an entry level phone and expects it to
have the features of a $600 phone. This memory issue hits those entry
level phones the hardest. If you move up from say 4GB of memory to 8GB,
the phone would go from having 600MB free to having 4.6GB free.

Part of the problem here is also that apparently Tmobile has some
software load on there that takes up a lot more space than is necessary.
I have a similar 4GB Android. IDK how much free memory it originally
had, but I haven't taken any apps off, have added apps that total
maybe 100 - 200MB, and it still reports 1.3GB free.