The soon to be released 32GB Microsoft Surface is highly unlikely to actually offer that much storage to us all, thanks to a beefy operating system that could leave purchasers with only around 20GB of free space.
The news was revealed in a Reddit ask-me-anything session with the Microsoft Surface team, BGR reports. One Ricardo Lopez, test manager for the tablet, wrote on the site that, "After the OS, OfficeRT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more than 20GB."
Microsoft's own guidelines for Windows 8 suggest you'll need 16GB of space for the 32-bit operating system, or 20GB for the 64-bit option, which doesn't leave users with much memory to use for themselves.
With this lack of memory users won't be able to save things with as much freedom in Microsoft Surface knowing that their is such a memory restriction due to the operating system that takes up a whopping 12GB of space.
It's possible that when Lopez talks about "a bunch of apps" for Microsoft Surface that these are just some downloadable things that the Surface team has been installing for fun, rather than Microsoft apps that you almost certainly have to have and that will undoubtedly hog space of your glorious machine. Losing roughly a third of a device's space to its operating system isn't a good sign for Microsoft and definately doesn't make for a good marketing campaign.
Unfortunately the Surface compares not so well with the iPad as Apple's tablet's operating system takes up only about 1GB of space. This could be the reason Microsoft chose not to make a 16GB version of the Surface, as once Windows RT and its associated apps were in place, there wouldn't be as much memory as you would want for your movies, games and everything else you could possibly use.
Despite a chunky operating system, Surface still offers more gigabytes for your buck than Apple's alternative. The cheapest Surface and iPad both cost £399, but for that you get a 32GB Surface and only a 16GB iPad. However minus the memory problems, Microsoft Surface looks to be promising.
