14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, we told you that Sony made the Xperia M4 Aqua available for purchase worldwide. But if you were thinking of buying this handset, we have a word of warning for you.
The handset arrives with a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen with 720p resolution and bundles a 1.5GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor fitted with 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD card slot). However, as the folks of Xperia Blog point out, Sony has deeply crippled the storage capacity on the phone.
Apparently, the European E2303 retail model of the Xperia M4 Aqua, the one that comes SIM-free and with build 26.1.A.100 on board, actually offers only a meager 1.26GB of free space for installing your own apps. Out of the 8GB on board, 4GB are taken up by Android 5.0 and 2GB by pre-installed apps.
Sony Xperia M4 Aqua is quite limited storage-wise
That wouldn’t be such a big problem if one were allowed to uninstall some of the pre-installed apps, but that’s not possible in some cases. The largest memory hog is Facebook.
Even so, even if you remove Facebook, Kobo Books or AVG, you’re still confronted with the insufficient capacity of 1.73GB.
Sadly, this amount of storage is quite insufficient for today’s standards and it’s puzzling to see why Sony didn’t think to make a 16GB variant of the Xperia M4 Aqua like it did with the Xperia C4.
It’s interesting to note that even Sony’s official guide for the phone doesn’t reveal the correct memory capacity.
“The E2303, E2353 and E2312 have 3GB of free memory available to the user for downloaded applications and their data, music, pictures and movies while each device has up to 8GB of flash memory in total,” the manual says.
So in order to make the most of this handset, users will have to purchase a microSD card. Even so, this transition won’t be a viable solution for some APKs and data.
The storage drought on the Xperia M4 Aqua surely puts a damper of things, but the phone remains a pretty decent affair, as you can see from the spec list we detailed above.
In the UK, the Xperia M4 Aqua is available for £230 / €315 / $350.
