Gadgetory

recently we did a video on how much storage you should have in your desktop or laptop computer but the brain trust here at Tec wiki got back to work and quickly decided hey hold on a minute people are on their phones a lot more than their computers these days why don't we do an episode about whether buying a high-capacity phone is worth it and when I say high-capacity I mean it these days it is easy to find phones with up to 512 gigabytes of on-board storage that's as much as you would find in some laptops and there are even a handful of one terabyte models on the horizon but is there a practical use for such spacious phones or is everyone dropping fat stacks on them just wasting their money let's break down what actually eats up phone storage to begin with any phone you buy will obviously have an operating system installed that takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 15 gigabytes depending on exactly how it's been tweaked by the manufacturer for your device so after you knock that much off the listed capacity another massive space hog on your phone can be games just like on a desktop PC now of course you're not gonna see mobile games that take up 50 gigabytes or more like you would on Steam but the lower capacities of most smartphones mean that you do have to keep track of what you're installing quite a few of the more graphically intensive games out there can take up around 2 gigabytes of space each and some of them can even take upwards of 5 however most games usually take between a couple dozen and a couple hundred megabytes so let's say you like your games and you've got a handful of the more elaborate titles and then a dozen or so of the lighter ones you're probably looking at another 10 to 15 more gigabytes for gaming the next storage glutton is video to use an iPhone as an example a standard 1080p video at 30 frames per second will take up around a hundred and thirty megabytes of storage per minute with 4k video at the same frame rate taking up about three times that much so if you have a total of let's say an hour a video at both 1080 and 4k on your phone you're probably looking at needing around another 20 gigabytes of space the nice thing though is that both iPhones and Android devices come with a certain amount of free cloud storage and of course you can pay for more thing is though it will take slightly longer to access files in the cloud as opposed to one stored locally on your phone and if you're on your mobile data connection and you've got a low bandwidth cap it could end up costing you money to bring down videos that you want to show someone now with that said we still do recommend that if you shoot lots of videos or photos regardless of how much storage space is on your phone that you do safely back them up either to the cloud or to another device in case your device gets lost or damaged now speaking of photos many flagship calibre phones will use around 4 megabytes per photo on their default settings so if you have about 500 photos stored on your phone something that can happen pretty easily you're gonna need to add another 2 gigabytes again though cloud storage will help offset this impact if you've got a quick shutter figure but what about audio well gone are the days where most of us are walking around with gigs upon gigs of songs in our pocket because these days it's much more common to subscribe to a streaming service like Spotify and Jam out that way so we're gonna assume that you don't need a ton of space for actual music but with that said you might want to reserve another gigabyte or two or another 10 or 20 if you're into downloading podcasts or audiobooks or video content from Netflix and consuming it when you're offline like when you're on the plane bringing us finally to the variable with the greatest amount of variation all your other apps so if you've been keeping score at home we've come in at anywhere from around 50 gigabytes of space to 70 to keep things comfortable for what we would consider to be a pretty heavy user but how much you need beyond this heavily depends on how you use your phone it's very easy for the average user with a couple dozen taps installed to need an additional 15 to 20 gigabytes not only for the apps themselves but in many cases to store all the extra data that they create and download think about all the photos that you take from within a social media app or all the pictures that people share with you in large group chats so with all that said what's the answer to the original question well we think that a user who uses their phone for lots of different things should be very comfortable with either a 64 gig or 120 gigabyte model depending on their specific needs so at this time we wouldn't recommend spending money to go over that unless you've got some really esoteric use case where you know you're gonna go over that speaking of going over that I've got to go over these notes from our sponsor pulse way is a real-time remote monitoring 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