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1.5 GB of RAM?

lvt

Android Expert
Jan 30, 2013
2,702
1,293
Paris <--> Taipei
I've seen a couple of phones advertised as having 16GB of ROM and 1.5GB of RAM, at least a Samsung phone and a HTC phone has that technical figure, I didn't search further but I think the list could be a bit longer.

So the question is why 1.5GB and not 2GB? It's really 1.5GB or it's 2GB with 512MB used for something else?
 
My 2009, HTC Droid Eris with a whopping 256 MB of RAM:

upload_2016-8-15_15-51-24.png


:)
 
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use ram expander. its very nice app , its a root app. it increse your ram

Welcome to AF, but there's really no such thing...your RAM is your RAM--it's a hardware thing and not a software thing.

There may be tricks and strategies that a root-capable app does, but you're just messing with how Android manages RAM vs. truly expanding something that soldered onto the device's motherboard.
 
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Wow, how far we've come in 7 years! My 2009 phone was the legendary Motorola Droid... the phone that really put Android on the map. 256 MB of RAM and 512 MB of storage!

MotorolaDroid.jpg


Now the Note 7 is coming out Friday ( :D ) with 16x more RAM and 128x more storage! o_O

To answer your question though (gotta stay on topic, after all), I found this article that you may find helpful:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/how-much-ram-does-a-phone-need

:)
 
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Referring back to the original post I think that 16GB of "ROM" (sic) is also too little these days, since that will mean no more than 10GB available to the user.

Yes it's little, barely noticeable if you consider the new phones that can add up to 128GB via SD card.

But the good thing is that main manufacturers seem to have abandoned the "partitioned storage" habit, you can install as much apps as you want until the ROM is full. Many earlier phones have a dedicated apps storage, once it's full you can't add more apps without uninstalling some other apps.

On the other hand, a large internal memory actually represents a risk of losing data if your phone is broken, a SD card slot and cloud based storage made the amount of ROM less critical nowadays while adding security.
 
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The old storage model was dropped when 4.0 came out. The real question is why some off-brand budget phones continue to use it when it isn't even what the base OS does?

I like SD, but for applications it's better to have adequate internal storage (sd is less reliable, and moving apps doesn't move the whole app, unless you mean the "adoptable storage" feature in which case it has all of the drawbacks of internal storage as well). For media storage it's fine, but given that cards do fail and that a device can be lost or stolen as well as broken it doesn't make the data truly secure - you still need a backup (though that doesn't have to be a cloud backup).
 
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My HTC One SV still have a dedicated apps memory while running 4.2.2 so I had to use Link2sd to extend the memory for apps.

The Pro version of Link2sd can move the whole app (executables + libraries + cache...) to the SD card. It just leaves a symbolic link, if the SD card is not mounted you can't start the app.

The main downside is the read/write speed, even with the best card I could find locally, the lag is still noticeable, especially with large apps like Facebook, Dropbox, Messenger...
 
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class 10 cards with good read write.otherwise don't bother with the ram expander.

you need a top notch card with decent read write just to keep up.
I got a Samsung evo 4g 32 gig microsdhc in mine and with ram expander you do notice a difference.card needs to be high to work well tho cause your tech dealing with virtual ram whitch is a tad bit slower than physical ram but can be just as good of a boost with the best cards.

I tested this with that one hard ball game.i forget the name now as I got tired of it but it required a lot of constant ram to not be sluggish.running my setup it ran perfect
 
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card needs to be high to work well tho cause your tech dealing with virtual ram...

No you're not, you're using a physical swap file. The Linux kernel uses this to "park" RAM contents that are not immediately required in order to make resources available to currently-running programs. The constant reading/writing inevitably has a cost in latency, and will seriously reduce the life of the microSD card.

I used similar kludges back in the day with my HTC Hero (288MB RAM), so I know only too well how they work. :(
 
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