[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Donquick999:
Hi to all you knowledgeable people. Some assistance and general clarification would be great on this, please.

The story starts with my wife's phone. I don't think that the model etc is important for this question, but it is an LG F60 (or something like that) and it is nearly new. The phone only has 4GB of memory so I made sure that I bought a good size SD card to go with it and I have set the OS to use the card for all media files. This seem to be working as all photos and music etc. are on the SD and there is nothing memory hungry on the internal mem. She has had the unit for a week or so and added perhaps 3 apps + those that were there as part of the out of the box config and now the thing is full - really! So I have a look at the memory usage and see - total 4GB - some apps and some bits and bobs 1.4GB - 'other' 2.44GB. When you drill down 'other' is almost all something called ‘system data’. So the first and simple question is this - does the android OS really need ~2.5 GB out of the box with little use, or have we done something wrong / ill advised? [BTW there are no backups locally, they are remote through a google account]

I connected the device to the PC to try to diagnose the situation. So the Internal storgae is reporting 60MB free of 1.32GB. This implies that 1.32 is all that we had to play with at all which would point towards the fact that the other 2.44 is correct for the OS. There is a folder called android which has ~25MB of data in it but nothing sizable elsewhere on the viewable internal storage space.

Out of interest I have connected a 7" android tablet to the PC to see if this reports the same sort of usage. This is showing 4.3 free from 5.5 total. This is an 8gb device so again this would suggest that 2.5 is used for system, which supports my initial fears.

If it does take 2.5GB just to provide a UI then is it wise or ethical for manufactures to sell devices with this little memory. Who would have thought that we would be suffering from memory issues in 2014 when a 32GB SD costs the price of a sandwich and a drink. I really am struggling with this whole concept. I mean an Ipad cost a lot of money and yet you have to choose to get the one with 32GB rather than 16GB even though the difference probably costs the company literally pence (if anything) - what is going on? My son had to remove loads of things from his ipad to even update the OS to the latest version - it just all seems soooo very crazy to me. With 4GB memory these phones are coming to the market and they are barely fit for purpose. You can buy a laptop these days (for not too much, a few hundred at most) and basically you can just sit and chuck data at it for years before you have any storage problem. Yes - I do understand the dif between a hard disk and RAM (it is called something else now I guess), but even so, these whole tablet industry is seriously flawed by this design limitation IMO. To add to this fact that it is made difficult to transfer data to and from ipads (less so android I realise) and they don't have an expansion slot, their popularity seems a fantastic mystery to me.

Anyway rant over - can somebody help me to understand the phone issue and how I might go about moving the OS onto the card or something of that kind which might improve the situ.

Thanks,