Smartphone Firmware Sizes Rival Those Of Desktop PCs Now

Here's the number game of the day: When I recently installed Ubuntu on a PC I noticed that the complete package that installs everything from the OS to the Office Suite has a size of 1.1 GB. When looking at firmware images of current smartphones I was quite surprised that the images are at least the same size or are even bigger!

If you want to see for yourself, search for "<smartphone name> stock firmware image" on the net and see for yourself. Incredible, there's as much software on mobile devices now as there is on PCs!

A lot of it must be crap- and bloatware, though, because Cyanogen firmware images have a size of around 250 MB. Add to that around 100 MB for a number of Google apps that need to be installed separately and you are still only at about a third of a manufacturer's stock firmware image size.