What capacity does your mobile phone actually have?

British consumer protection organization Which? has put popular smartphone models under the microscope, revealing their true capacity. According to experts, 16GB devices end up giving up to 46% of their internal memory to the operating system, built-in applications (the so-called bloatware) and system files.

Apple's iPhone 5C ranked first in terms of available memory, with bloatware and the operating system taking up 21% of its capacity – leaving 12.6GB free. The Google Nexus 5 followed with 12.28GB of available memory, the Apple iPhone 5S with 12.20GB and the Sony Xperia Z1 with 11.43GB. The Blackberry Z30 came in second with 11.20GB, the HTC One Mini with 10.44GB, the LG G2 with 10.37GB, and the Samsung Galaxy S4 came in last with 8.56GB.

According to researcher John Barrow , who took part in the study, unfortunately for users, most of the "factory" applications and features of mobile phones cannot be deleted to... free up valuable memory.

"The reality is that every phone has to sacrifice a portion of its internal memory for the sake of its operating system – which means that the phone's free memory does not correspond to the stated 8, 16, or 32GB," explains Barrow.

Samsung, for its part, was quick to explain that "in the case of the Galaxy S4 with 16GB of memory, 6.85GB is occupied by the operating system in order for the device to have a better screen resolution and offer more powerful features to consumers. For this purpose, the company offers users the ability to expand the memory of their device via a microSD memory card."

On the other hand, Barrow pointed out that despite the fact that the iPhone 5C and 5S as well as the Nexus 5 came out on top in terms of their available internal memory, these devices do not offer the ability to expand through the addition of an external memory card.