Samsung announced the S5 would be available in 16gb and 32gb.  In some countries the 32gb has surfaced.  But not the UK and in fact it’s not available in most places.

This is due to Samsung and the networks choosing the cheaper 16gb model as there is a memory card slot.  And the less storage you have the more you need to stream and the more expensive your contact will need to be. Now if Samsung only made a 32gb with micro sd card support that would be ideal.

But can you manage with 16gb? Yes if you use a memory card and don’t play many large games.  And your phone is a Samsung and the developer builds in some support for memory cards.

Let’s have a look at my two week old S5.

Out of 16gb, 4gb was already used up by Samsung. By the time I installed all Samsung’s apps, extras and my apps and games I had a total of 118 apps of which 40 were games. I have a 64gb memory card installed.

Plenty of space left on the card but remember video recording will swallow that fast.

Now the S5 has a limited support for moving part of an app to the memory card if supported by the developer. 

Above you can see that NFS Most Wanted installed 2gb on the memory card leaving about 15mb for the app in main memory.  But not all games support this.  Ah but not so fast. Look again. The apps that have the right box ticked do have part installed on the micro sd card. Those that don’t have been still installed into the internal memory but under a section called sd card. Confusing.

AVP and Shadowgun only installed to main memory even when using the option shown below where you can force the app to use the memory card. 

Prince of Persia allowed me to move most of the app to the memory card but not all of it. New blockbuster games are busting above the 2gb mark and it’s time for phones to have 32gb as standard especially as most phones don’t support this move to memory card and Google doesn’t like it either.

In new versions of android the memory card is only meant for music and photos mainly,  not for installing apps and games.

However,  so far I have managed with some careful management.