Early adopters of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone have complained about the amount of memory available, after it was discovered that almost half of the capacity of its 16GB model is taken up by the operating system and preinstalled apps from the vendor and its operator partners.

According to CNet, the vendor said that its platform storage requirement is around 1GB higher than for the Galaxy SIII, “in order to provide a high resolution display and more powerful features to our consumers”. The device maker also said that the device includes a microSD storage slot to provide extra capacity, although this cannot be used to install apps.

While the use of specified storage to store system files is common practice, the issue is the amount of memory taken up by preinstalled data. The not especially unbiased Apple Insider said that for Apple’s iPhone 5, the total available is around 77.5 per cent, compared with around 55 per cent for the Galaxy S4.

The memory issue is not the only negative press the Galaxy S4 has received in recent weeks. Some reports said that devices powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 5 processor suffer from what was tagged “S Lag”, becoming unresponsive in normal use. The same problem was not noted for Qualcomm-powered versions of the flagship.

And battery life has also come in for criticism, although it appears that this may be related to several “power hungry” background services which the device runs, rather than being a hardware problem. While a definite negative for users, this could be rectified by a software update.