UKC

I am in the market for a new phone, simply because.

However I have noticed that there appears to be an Arms Race developing for phones to have more and more RAM in them.

Going off Microsoft's own spec's Windows 7 requires 2Gb of RAM, and I think that we can all agree that its quite a big operating system compared to any operating system running phones.

My question, mainly for Android phones, is there a need for 3Gb or even 4 Gb in a phone or are these marketing gimmicks to make one phone look better than another on a Top Trumps style Comparison site?

In reply to The Lemming:

The more the merrier.

In reply to The Lemming:

I have a mid-range Android that has 8Gb RAM but up to 64Gb SD card, which gives me as much flexibility as I want for keeping music, photos and videos locally. I think phones with no card storage option are absurdly limited, to the point of being effectively obsolete within probably just a couple of years.

In reply to The Lemming:

Just to add that if I had only the 8Gb and no card option I would be tearing my hair out by now due to having to continually uninstall things and to clear the cache frequently even to install updates to installed apps never mind installing new ones, and I really don't have many apps installed.

In reply to john arran:
I suspect that your getting mixed up with system ram and user ram as you can't upgrade system ram.

In reply to The Lemming:

Have a look at this recent Guardian article on what is a reasonable minimum amount of RAM for the new iPhones:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/10/why-apple-should-not-be-s...

In reply to john arran:

No, your phone has 8GB of storage. RAM is system memory for rapid access and most phones have 1GB or less.

Android needs as much RAM as it can get. If you can afford it, get a phone with more RAM – all Androids start to lag and slow down as they age, but one with more RAM will stay faster for longer.

In reply to The Lemming:
RAM is not the same as the user accessible memory for storing photos/videos etc, although they are confusing both measured in gb.

Most phones have ~2gb of RAM, the iphone 6 only has 1gb and does fine.

As for memory for storage, it depends what you use your phone for, some might want a 128gb microSD card with all their music on, some will be ok with the 8gb that may be built in.

In reply to mbh:

Again.... system ram and user ram are two TOTALLY different things.

In reply to Only a hill:

You have zero choice when it comes to system ram the phone manufacturer decides how much you get. You can decide how much user ram i.e. Samsung Galaxy S6 offers 32gb, 64gb or 128gb BUT all three are limted ro 4GB of system ram.

In reply to Indy:

Yes you're right, although that's because 1.5 Gb has always been completely fine running Android up to 4.2.2 so never caused me to even look into limits for system RAM and I'd assumed it was all ringfenced from the 8Gb total.
I've learned something anyway, so thanks.

In reply to Indy:

OK I lied its only 3gb of system memory in a Galaxy S6

In reply to Indy:

You're right!

In reply to The Lemming:

Hi chaps. I think that I may have inadvertantly caused some confusion. When I asked about RAM, I was enquiring how much the Operating System would need to work without any problems. I understand and know how much storage space that I require from a phone, which is distinctly seperate to the RAM.

I hope that this clears up any confusion that I may have created.

My desktop computer has a 64bit processor and 8Gb of RAM to feed Windows7. Provided that I don't do anything too labour intensive like video editing, I don't usually push beyond 3Gb of RAM, and that is with all the bells and whistles turned on.

I am guessing that Android is a much smaller OS and as such requires far less RAM to feed its needs. So, how much RAM is needed to run Android Lollipop, Marshmallow or what ever follows in a year or so?

I don't want to buy a phone with most of the cost going on extra RAM that is only there for marketing purposes.

In reply to Indy:


This is the sort of thing that I am interested in. I have even read about one or two flagship style phones with 4Gb of RAM.

Apple seem quite happy with 1Gb and possibly 2Gb so why would Android want to up the Arm's Race with up to 4Gb of RAM?

I'm sure that I read that Android were trying to slim things down when it created Kitkat because it was getting concerned that the OS may be getting too big for its little RAM boots.

In reply to The Lemming:


Because Android has completely different demands to iOS and is far more resource heavy. I have used a Galaxy Note 3 (3GB RAM) and it lagged seriously after six months.

In reply to Only a hill:

The lag is unlikely to be related to the amount of RAM, more likely fragmentation or growth of some system files it was accessing.
Unless it ran out of room to cache files which the OS needed to access, causing paging. Which would suggest a badly written / optimised OS. Or a misbehaving app.

Imo, of course.

In reply to SiGregory:


Hmm

Both my Nexus 4 and 7 have 2Gb of RAM and have never shown signs of slowing down even with the latest Android OS on them.

However I've been doing a bit of reading and it would seem that the new phones with 64bit processors do like to have more RAM to keep them ticking over. I'm confused. :-/

In reply to The Lemming:

It's faster than mass storage. Though probably not by as much as it is faster than a 5 1/4" floppy drive.

In reply to Only a hill:

Nothing to do with system RAM. My 1GB moto G rocks along nicely. A reset, wipe yr data, (not before a back-up) and reinstall of apps' would probably put it back to where it was when you bought it.

D

In reply to Only a hill:


This isn't just Android phones. It is all phones and is caused by fragmentation of the storage space. A solution is to put as much stuff on SD card and then once in a while back up your storage card, format and then restore... or something like that. Haven't done it myself, but I have noticed that running apps from the internal phone store is dog slow compared to my new SD card.

In reply to The Lemming:

I'm guessing that there is no way of knowing how much RAM is just enough and what is too much?

In reply to The Lemming:

For what?

I've got 3 phones, each with 1,2 and 3GB system RAM memory. The 3GB one is lovely and smooth and runs stock Android, as is the 2GB one. The 1GB is fine but slower, sometimes stutters if you have lots of apps open. All of them work. Depends how much you want a smooth experience and how much you are prepared to pay to achieve it. BTW the 2GB is over two years old.

D

In reply to The Lemming:

This is getting weirder and more complex as I read more. A contributor on theA Forums seems to think that more RAM eats into your battery while on standby, so its best to match your RAM to the battery strength. Sounds strange but has a hint of truth to it.

I also seem to remember a while back that Android were going to make their Kit-Kat operating system more lean by using less RAM because there were a lot of budget phones and tablets hitting the shelves with limited amounts of RAM. Google didn't want an operating system to compete with Apple only to have it too bloated for the majority of the budget kit flooding the market. Microsoft's Vista suffered this problem.

But I am still non the wiser about how much is enough and how much is too much when looking for an upgrade. Up until today I would have said 1Gb was too little. This is because I have an ASUS TF300T Tablet, since 2012. In March 2014 ASUS gave it their last official update from Ice Cream Sandwich to Jelly Bean. And from that fateful official upgrade, my Tablet became a sluggish pile of crap. And I wasn't alone because ASUS screwed over every TF300T user the world over. I tried a couple of unsupported operating systems (ROM's) but they were just as bad so I gave up and left it for 18 months. I simply had an expensive pile of plastic.

Today however I had another stab at looking for a new operating system. This time I have been successful in my quest as my new operating system has jumped two full incarnations, and more importantly incorporated the slimmed down use of RAM.

My three year old Tablet, which has 1Gb of RAM is now zipping along the latest-ish version of Lollipop 5.1.1.

So with no technical knowledge, am I correct in guessing that 1Gb is the minimum for Android and 3Gb is a bit excessive?

In reply to The Lemming:

I think you are on the right tracks Lemming. One factor is how much you multitask and use different apps. Android will leave apps running in the background (in ram) after you close them but if you open other apps and your ram is full then the background ones will be closed. It is much faster to bring an app from the background (still in ram) than to reload it from scratch.

You can see that in this way it will use as much as you give it - it will simply keep more apps open in the background and be able to open them faster (by not closing them fully).

I personally would go for 2GB over 1GB for speediness (though 1GB would be sufficient to run all but intensive games normally) but think more than 2 is a bit excessive. At the end of the day, like most things it is a trade off between price and performance.