Ice Cream Sandwich explained: MTP - what is it, why use it, and how to set it up | Android Central

Ice Cream Sandwich explained: MTP - what is it, why use it, and how to set it up | Android Central:

'via Blog this'

...Simply put, MTP is now the standard being used to stop OEM's and carriers from giving you oodles of  "storage space" and very little application space.  That's not the ramblings of a crotchety old Android geek, but the word right from Android engineer Dan Morril:

We didn't do this because we wanted to use ext3 (although that is a side benefit.) We did it because we wanted to be able to merge the "public shared storage" (i.e. for music and photos) with the internal private app storage.

We got tired of seeing OEMs include many GB of internal storage for music, while users were still running out of space for apps and data. This approach lets us merge everything on one volume, which is way better.