A California lawyer is suing Microsoft Corp., claiming the Surface
tablet he bought doesn't have all the storage space the company
advertised.
Andrew Sokolowski, a lawyer in Los Angeles, claims that he
bought a Surface with 32 gigabytes of storage last week. But he quickly
ran out of space after loading it with music and Microsoft Word
documents.
He discovered that a significant portion of the 32 GB
storage space was being used by the operating system and pre-installed
apps such as Word and Excel. Only 16 GB was available for him to use.
Sokolowski's
lawyers filed the suit alleging false advertising and unfair business
practices on Tuesday at the Superior Court in Los Angeles. They are
seeking class action status.
The suit aims to change how Microsoft
advertises its device and hopes to force the company to give back
revenue and profits that resulted from its alleged wrongful conduct.
Microsoft said in a statement that it believes the suit is without merit.
"Customers
understand the operating system and pre-installed applications reside
on the device's internal storage thereby reducing the total free space,"
the company said. It noted that people can add storage via the microSD
slot and USB port.
Microsoft confirmed on Nov. 5 exactly how much
usable storage space its Surface tablets come with out of the box. It
says on its website that the 32 GB Surface has 16 GB of free space while
the 64 GB version has 45 GB free. The Surface started selling Oct. 26
and Sokolowski bought his device on Nov. 7.
Sokolowski's lawyer,
Rhett Francisco, said Wednesday that his client never saw Microsoft's
responses and said the details on its website are "buried."
"They make you search and dig for it specifically, or you would never find it," he said.
It's common for mobile devices to have less usable storage space than advertised.
Flash
drives and regular hard drives provide less usable memory than their
labels say, mainly because there are two definitions of the word
"gigabyte." That means that, right off the bat, consumers get about 7
percent less space than advertised. A 16 GB drive, for example, has
about 15 GB available for use.
On flash drives, the kind used in
tablets, another factor reduces the available storage further. A portion
of the memory space is set aside to replace "cells" that wear out over
time. For this reason, Apple's 16 GB iPad has an actual storage capacity
that's 11 percent lower than the one advertised: 14.3 GB. The 64 GB
model stores 57.2 GB.
On the iPad, all the storage space after the
11 percent "discount" is available for the user's photos, movies and
apps. The operating system and Apple's pre-installed apps have their
own, separate memory space. Microsoft's operating system and apps, in
contrast, share memory space with the user.
Michael Gartenberg,
research director for technology research firm Gartner Inc., said
Microsoft has consistently said there would be less memory available
than is advertised. He said it is "unsurprising" that its new operating
system and near full-blown version of Office take up a big chunk of the
memory.
"I think they made it pretty clear to consumers what they're getting," he said.
And
even if Microsoft's base-model Surface only has 16 GB of memory
available, that's still slightly more than the 14.3 GB you'll get from
the latest Wi-Fi only iPad for the same price of $499.
Microsoft Surface in pictures