One of the key features people look for when browsing for a new mobile at Fonehouse is the amount of storage on offer. What most people do is stretch the budget to grab the biggest storage they possibly can, but this is not always the most useful way to spend your money. Depending on what you use your phone for you could find that smaller storage and a higher spec phone is the better bet. Too much storage can actually be an issue, so let’s have a look at the best way to work out what you really need.
Two Types of Storage
All phones have onboard storage, usually starting at 8GB and stretching right up to 256GB. The price jumps accordingly so for some people budget dictates everything. iPhone only offers built-in storage whereas some other manufacturers have added microSD cards, which means that in theory, you can never run out of space. If you are an iPhone fan, this can be a bit disappointing however you might not need as much storage as you think.
How Do You Use Your Phone?
This really is the key to the storage problem. Whatever size storage you opt for you have to remember that a percentage is taken up by system type applications and bloatware – but some of these can be uninstalled or have features turned off to shrink their dominance over storage.
Photography Fans
If you are a keen photographer, it is worth understanding how much space photos take up. It is always good practice to back up your phone, so precious images do not get lost, but the best advice is to go one step further and use cloud-based storage to replace the handset, meaning you can effectively delete them from the phone once safely stored. You can save approximately 200 photos in 1GB of storage. 30GB will give you 5000 images but do you really want to be carrying these around on your phone all the time?
Videos are much bigger space hogs, with 5GB needed to capture 10 minutes of footage, so if you like to film things more significant storage could benefit you, or pick a handset with a card slot, so you can just remove and replace the card when it gets full.
Music Buffs
There is a misconception that music claims vast amounts of storage but again, depending on what you use your phone for, you may be surprised. If you are carrying a workout playlist or some tunes for the car, then your 1GB of storage actually gives you 200 songs. For serious music addiction, 5000 songs can be stored in 30GB
App Addiction
Most apps are actually quite small. Watch for 3D games as these are memory hungry, but most apps are quite small. 10GB will enable 40 or 50 apps quite comfortably.
Understanding how you use your phone will help you make a better choice when it comes to deciding on storage. Remember there are always hundreds of deals on offer so spend time searching for the one that suits you best, remembering that bigger is not always better.