Bill Gates may not have actually said “640,000 should be enough for anyone,” but how much is enough? Android Go edition phones come with one or two gigs, mid-range models often have 4-6GB, then flagships start at 8GB and go up to 24GB.
These numbers vary by brand, of course. You won’t get more than 12GB from Samsung or Google, Apple won’t even go that far, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max has 8GB of RAM. Other brands will happily cram 16GB into a mid-range device.
The first smartphone with 24GB of RAM arrived a few months ago, it was the Red Magic 8S Pro+. A gaming phone, of course. There have been 5 more since then and most of them are not gaming phones, at least not as involved as the Red Magic.
It’s too much? Well, games consume memory by nature, but nowadays web browsers also consume a lot of RAM when visiting complex sites (especially with multiple tabs open). And there’s the familiar problem for both Android and iOS that the operating system kills an app running in the background to free up RAM for the foreground app. Again, some brands are better than others in this regard.
When buying a new phone, how much RAM do you look for?
As you may have noticed, “Virtual RAM” has become very popular lately and promises to increase your RAM capacity often by up to double it. But this is just virtual memory with better marketing, there is no additional RAM – the data is simply written to the storage space. And with modern, fast flash storage, it works much better than it did with spinning hard drives.
The Android memory model
However, it seems like a clunky solution for keeping background apps alive. For what it’s worth, Google isn’t a fan, writing “On Android, storage is not used for swap space like on other Linux implementations since frequent writing can cause this memory to wear out and reduce media life archiving”. .”
But maybe you don’t agree: Have you found virtual RAM to improve the usability and performance of your phone? Or do you keep it disabled?
Start a new Thread