recently we did a video on how much storage you should have in your desktop
or laptop computer but the brain trust here at techwiki 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 going to 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 two gigabytes of space each and some of them can even take upwards of
five 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 130 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 of 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 caliber phones will use around four
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 two 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 going to 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 audio books 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 um 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 apps 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 going to go over that speaking of going over that i've got to go over
these notes from our sponsor pulseway is a real-time remote monitoring and
management software that helps you fix problems on the go by sending commands
from any mobile device it's compatible with Windows mac and Linux and
pulseway's single app gives you remote desktop functionality so you can get
access to real-time status system resources logged in users network
performance Windows updates and more with pulseway you can create and deploy
custom scripts to automate your it tasks you can scan install and update all your
systems on the go and you don't have to take my word for it you can try it for
free at pulseway.com or at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a
comment with video suggestions if you want to see your ideas on techwiki and
just don't forget to subscribe and follow so you don't miss it
we won't pay you for the idea but you'll get the satisfaction of seeing your idea
on the internet wow