Without a doubt the Samsung Galaxy S4 when it is launched next week will be a big hit. This is due to it being a competent piece of kit and Samsung’s tremendous marketing budget.

But it is not unusual nowadays for any phone to have memory allocated for the system firmware. For example, the HTC One is advertised as a 32gb phone but has just over 25gb actually free. That’s 7gb for the firmware.

So if the HTC One needs 7gb approximately, how much does the Samsung S4 require? Well, at present there are two options being mentioned around the web. Russian website mobile-review mentioned it has only 8gb free, whereas elsewhere it increased to 9.2gb. Nothing unusual with these figures and in line with the firmware requirements of the HTC One.

However, if 8-9gb is left free for the user, that is a precarious amount if you like games, or have apps that have large databases. Medical apps are a good example that could have a large database requirement. Need for Speed Most Wanted is a great game, but its also nearly 2gb in size. Also, if you buy music on the device from amazon or google or even a film, or rent a film, it will again need to be saved in the phones main memory.

But, I hear you say, the memory is expandable with a micro sd card. Sort of. The memory card can be used for storing the camera shots or camera videos, documents and music you have copied across from your computer. It cannot be used for saving apps or games. The S4 burst camera mode needs to store the photos in the main memory.

So if you don’t install many apps, then you should have nothing to worry about, but if you are the opposite, your 8-9gb memory will be swallowed up.

So is there a solution. Well according to Samsung, the S4 will be available in 32/64gb options. However, no information has been confirmed by Samsung of the availability of these, and based on previous Samsung phones, S3 and Note 2, the promised larger capacities never materialised. I can only hope that this time the larger memory versions will surface.