Why does my computer say my internal memory is empty, but my phone says it's full?

[AC Question]

I have the Elephone P10 running android 4.4.2. My phone has 16gb of internal memory, and I have a couple of apps installed. But when I plug my phone into my pc, and i right click on properties it tells me that the internal storage is empty. (It says 12.3gb free of 12.3gb, I'm guessing the other 3.7 gb are for the OS)
But it dosn't end there! I started installing more and more apps and my phone now says all the space is taken up! (it says 43mb free. 957 mb used). Why does my phone think I only have 1gb of internal memory?? Plz help!
Thanks for any answer I get

 

[Crashdamage]

You are out of space to install apps on your device. Apps are not installed in the memory as you think they are. Plus, from your description it seems your device has a rather odd partitioning scheme leaving very limited space for installing apps.

Install this simple app. It's very small and will install in very limited space. It will tell you where apps are installed and how much space you actually have left for installing apps:

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...pps/details?id=sa.storagetruth&token=_B41SDL-

To make space you can:
Delete some texts or emails. If you really have lots, this can help.
Uninstall app updates.
Uninstall apps.
Clear caches, but that will only make space temporarily. Cache files will rebuild over time. Also, while clearing cache files won't hurt anything, they're there for good reasons and should be left alone.


Android since v1.0. Linux user since 2001.

 

[VidJunky]

I can't really explain the phone memory read and report thing... Even for memory at its limit that seems odd. The computer thing may be explained by one of two things, is the phone unlocked when connected to your computer? The phone not only has to be on but it has to be opened to at least your home screen. Also and less likely your device may have a setting for what to do while connected USB. That is usually in security, or sometimes under memory. The other thing is some devices show two drives when connected to a computer. One may be your system partition, which isn't usually accessible and the other is your SD partition. Check to see how many drives pop up when your device is connected and that you are picking the correct one.

Have you manually cleared any caches on the device, or done anything to reduce what you are carrying on the device? Devices sometimes start to act up when memory resources are maxed out. This could account for your memory reads. And although less likely a bad cable could account for your PC issue, however if your cable were bad or not functioning correctly you wouldn't see your device at all, but I thought I'd throw that out there.