Any Nokia Lumia smartphone that you buy comes with 7GB of storage on SkyDrive, as well as the on-board capacity on the device itself. If you need to keep your eye on the storage of your phone, Nokia has now released a Storage Check settings app, available only on Nokia Lumia Windows Phones 8 smartphones.

With today’s technology, it’s possible to take high-def videos, high-res photos and store more music than you can shake a drumstick at, and this sometimes calls for some ‘housecleaning’.

Samuli Hänninen, Vice President, applications for Smart Devices, explains:

“We want to ensure that Nokia Lumia users receive the best and latest functionality for their smartphones, and we often deliver these as software updates or exclusive apps.

“Storage Check helps people control what’s on their phones in a simple, fast and effective way.”

With Storage Check for Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 smartphones, you can see at a glance how much space is taken up with data, including exactly what type of data that may be.

In the overview panel, a wheel dominates the screen and it’s divided into colourful sections. Each section represents a type of media such as apps, media and files, system and free space.

This enables you to immediately check what’s taking up the space on your phone. If you want a more detailed view, the total/used number in the centre of the wheel tells you more. Additionally, swiping right will bring the details panel into view.

Details delves deeper into the storage space, showing you exact numbers in terms of megabytes or gigabytes, as well as more precise information about what’s taking up the space. Unlike the standard WP storage app, you can see how much storage space your emails, music, photos, office documents are hogging. And, if you want to delete your temporary files, you can with just one tap.

Within Storage Check you can also see exactly how much space each app is using. You can then, if need be, remove it using the normal ‘long tap -> uninstall’ on the regular apps list.

We’d advise that you double-check anything you’re about to delete, of course.

Storage Check will initially be available on newer Lumia smartphones either out of the box or as an Over-The-Air firmware update and, once installed, can be found in the phone settings. Support for other Lumia Windows Phone 8 handsets is also coming.

Do you need more control over your storage? Will you be using Storage Check? Let us know, below.

UPDATE: 18 April, 2013

“If you have experienced problems with the app, try installing a new version that is now available on BetaLabs“

image credit: NatalieMaynor