Smartphone storage specs gotchas in SA
Advertising claiming that the Samsung Galaxy XCover 2 has 4GB of storage is misleading, the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASA) has ruled.
With the ASA’s system of precedent, this ruling could have an impact on how the storage specifications for all smartphones must be presented in advertising.
The ruling comes after a consumer complained that Samsung advertised the device on its website as having “4GB memory”, yet found that only 500MB of that storage was available to users.
He said that the operating system and Samsung’s software takes up approximately 3GB, while pre-loaded software from the service provider (Vodacom, in this case) consumes another 500MB.
Samsung did not deny these claims, but said that it was standard industry practice to provide the specifications of the phone’s hardware memory and not to provide an indication of the available storage space on the phone.
The ASA was not swayed by the argument that it was standard industry practice and said that the advertising would create a false impression with ordinary, uninformed consumers.
“While the Directorate can accept that industry experts would probably realise that the quoted figure is not representative of what consumers are going to get, this amounts to informed knowledge that the ordinary consumer would not readily have,” the ASA ruling stated.
“Having to forfeit approximately 75% of the advertised memory is significant.”
For this reason, the ASA declared the unqualified reference to “4GB Memory” misleading, and instructed Samsung to withdraw the advertising.
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