OP here. I got the Optimus V - dirt cheap and only has 256 mb of internal memory. So, obviously this isn't representative of "modern" phones, but I'm not convinced that better hardware is a good solution to a potential design flaw.
Case in point, this phone recently went on sale at Best Buy and Target and has been sold out in every store in my city. There's a lot of new Android users that will be dealing with this problem.
What version of Android does it run? I have a similar budget phone (ZTE Blade) and this was an issue under 2.1 (I would get warnings about being low on space) but I haven't even thought about it since I went to 2.2 a while ago. I believe most larger apps install themselves automatically to the SD card now? Enough do it that it doesn't bother me anyway.
I actually have no idea how much internal space my phone has, which I take as evidence that it's not an issue for me. Google tells me it's got a shockingly small sounding 150MB of internal of memory.
Blade has 512 MB of internal memory, but it is partitioned into /system, /data and /cache. Both system and data are somewhere around 235 MB each and cache is the rest.
Android doesn't help that it warns you when you are below 10% of free /data. On Blade, it is still 23 MB.
Just out of curiosity, what are you using for 2.2 on Blade? AFAIK, the official version is still 2.1.
Yeah, I got that installed. Unfortunately, there's still quite a few apps that only install to the internal memory. I hope that will change over time.
" roll around in the money you saved from not getting a 32GB iPhone."
That's exactly what I'm doing! For all my aggravations, the phone is still great. I only paid $140 for it (contract free!) and the savings from the virgin mobile prepaid plan will pay for the phone shortly.
As for a minimum spec, I'm a little torn. If Google had imposed a minimum spec, then I wouldn't be having this problem - because I wouldn't have bought the phone and wouldn't be telling my friends what a great deal it was.
Correct. All of the more recent "power" Android phones even tend to have 8GB internal.
I wonder what phone OP was using... I just checked my Droid X: 1 GB (of 16 GB) used on SD card, 2 GB (of 8G B) used on the internal.