How Much Storage Does Your Tablet Really Have?

By Mike Wheeler

Tablets are the new cool accessory and are fast finding a niche amongst those who find netbooks/laptops/notebooks/ultrabooks  too cumbersome, but still like a device to hook up to while on the move.

By Mike Wheeler

Tablets are the new cool accessory and are fast finding a niche amongst those who find netbooks/laptops/notebooks/ultrabooks  too cumbersome, but still like a device to hook up to while on the move.

A little snippet that caught our eye at the end of last year was a story about a Californian lawyer who is going to sue Microsoft because he believes that he was short-changed on the amount of storage he was given on is 32GB Surface tablet. According to the story, once all the preloaded apps and software  were taken into consideration, he only had 16GB left (which differs from the result in our survey). So that brought up the question, “how much storage does your tablet actually have?” when you take the device out of the box. We decided to take a cross-section of such devices from a variety of vendors and find out the actually amount of storage you would have upon starting up your new tablet.

The exercise is a snapshot of some of the most popular tablets available in the marketplace, and by no means intends to be fully inclusive. Our method was pretty straightforward – we went into JB Hifi, looked at various brands of tablet and how much storage they have, and then checked out via the settings how much storage they claim to have when sold. All the models looked at had no extra programs or apps downloaded. In all cases the settings stated the maximum storage the device had out of the box. We didn’t consider the expandable storage options such as SD or microSD slots, or USB connections to hook up an external hard drive. We were interested purely in how much internal storage you have upon purchase.

Summary
As there was nothing scientific about the process it is hard to give a scientific summary, however there were some interesting insights. It appears Apple gives the biggest bang for your buck, with not many programs or preloaded apps taking up space. The rest, to be fair, were middle of the road, with the two real exceptions being the Toshiba AT150 and Sony 9-inch tablets. We were so gobsmacked by the lack of storage, we acted as an uninformed, know-nothing customer to the guys in charge of tablets in the store and queried the amount of space available. After double checking, they assured us that the storage numbers were correct, but did appear perplexed themselves as to why there was a lack of space.  As to the original premise with regard to the Californian law suit, we believe that it is naïve for users to think they would get the full whack of storage as stated by the vendor, however we also believe that a consumer would be right to be angry if there was less than a half of the storage available for them to use when buying a tablet.

If you wish to add any device to our list, just leave a comment or drop us a line via [email protected].

Brand                                                 Storage                 Actual Storage

iPad 4                                                   64GB                     57.2GB
iPad 4                                                   32GB                     28.1GB
iPad 4                                                  16GB                     13.84GB
iPad Mini                                              16GB                     13.7GB
Microsoft Surface                               64GB                     54GB
Microsoft Surface                               32GB                     24.9GB
Samsung Galaxy Note II 10.1             16GB                     11.66GB
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1              16GB                     11.82GB
Motorola Xoom 2                                 32GB                     26.73GB
Nexus 7                                              16GB                     13.24GB
Toshiba AT200                                   16GB                     12.62GB
Toshiba AT150                                   16GB                      5.4GB
ASUS TF300                                       32GB                     22.25GB
Sony 9-inch Tablet                             16GB                      3.94GB