Help me with this "4gb internal flash" stamped on the box.

[Figueroa4]

I purchased a cheap tablet from Ematic just to see how it would work out for facebooking and fantasy football scoring while watching tv or surfing in bed. Well it works out great for that but I'm still thinking of returning it as I feel it is not what I thought I was purchasing and it causes for a pretty severe limitation now. The website and the box both say "4gb internal flash (up to 32gb with sd card)."

Well with this purchase I quickly found out that the "up to 32gb by sd" is limited to only my files like pics and music, cant install/move apps to it. But the part that gets me was that I soon realized there was no 4gb. When going into settings/storage it show 504mb total for system and 1.9gb total on nand flash. I write them and ask where the 4gb was and they replied with this:

Dear Customer,
The tablet is a 4GB of internal storage but the Android Rom takes usually around 3GB leaving 1GB for the user. All devices are like this even phones.
Customer Support - Vs

Do you think this is correct or am I being had? I would think that if even that was the case wouldn't it still show the 4gb, just showing most of it used. And is 3gb size normal for cheap tablets?

Thanks!:-\

 

[B. Diddy]

No, that's pretty standard. Devices will advertise their total onboard memory, but some of it will always be taken up by the system and by preinstalled apps. The Android system itself takes up around 2 GB, and the device probably has about 1 GB of other preinstalled bloatware that you can't get rid of. It's an annoyance, but it's pretty standard to report it this way.

 

[JRDroid]

This is pretty standard. I hate to say this, but you get what you pay for. There is a reason Android fans want devices to include more and more internal storage. 3 GB is a pretty small system image as a matter of fact. The Samsung Galaxy S IV's system image is about 8 GB. I would not buy an Android with less than 16 GB of storage, and wouldn't recommend one with less than 8 GB.