Storage appears to be a real problem for many smartphone users in South Africa, with 22% running out of space at least once a week and 56% running out of space at least every three months, according to new consumer research from SanDisk.
Sixty eight percent have also regretted deleting a precious photo or video to free up storage space. If they do have to delete files, 29% of South Africans would delete a photo of themselves before that of friends, pets or family.
The research, which looked at people’s experiences with storage on smartphones, also found that 38% of people have to delete files or data from their main handsets in order to free up space at least once a week, while two thirds (66%) do this at least once a month.
Ghassan Azzi, senior sales manager for Africa at Western Digital Corporation, says: “Our research really highlights the pressure that people are under to choose what they want to keep on mobile handsets. With the average person in South Africa taking 26 photos and eight videos a week on their smartphone, and the size of digital images and video increasing rapidly, devices soon fill up.”
In addition to the challenges around storage, the research also looked at security, with 56% of respondents being fairly worried or very worried that the files and data on their smartphone are at risk of theft or loss through product malfunction, and 68% said they had lost a precious photo or video from their smartphone as a result of files not being backed up.
Despite this, only 39% of South Africans manually back up their data and files from the main handset once a week, and nine percent never back up files at all, excluding automatic backups and data synchs.
Azzi adds: “What many people don’t realise is that there are numerous ways to quickly and easily transfer and store data from phones – either by connecting a device to the handset or using Wi-Fi – so you don’t have to choose what you delete. In addition, backing up your smartphone remotely means that you keep precious files safe, should anything happen to the handset.”
SanDisk, he says, offers a range of mobile memory products that allow users to easily expand the space on their phones or offload files so they don’t have to worry about storage limits of the device.
