Help Nexus One ram status?

[aero9898]

Hi everyone, just got my Nexus One yesterday. Love its speed.

just found answer in this topic (first-impressions-after-two-hours-hitting-n1-hard)

I was trying to find out how much is physical ram which doesn't display in system info, yeh I know its 512MB from spec.

Just curious, I download the app from market (internal memory widget and InfoDroid), it all display total ram as196MB, (both ram & rom total # aren't same from the spec. )

anyone have idea about this problem?
or just the app doesn't support?

 

[sooper_droid12]

This is true. Even though the N1 has both 512mb of RAM and ROM, only a small portion of both is available to the user. In another post, a Google technician said that an upcoming OTA will recoup about 100-150mb of RAM for the N1 because of kernel issue. Even so, that's still a very small portion of the overall RAM available. So, you'll like see a 290-340mb of RAM available. However, this hasn't been confirmed by any official Google sources or even if/when an OTA would be available.

 

[aero9898]

It makes me feel like buying a 16G microSD but only 4G space available.....

 

[sooper_droid12]

Huh? It'll support up to a 32gig microSD, but 4gig should be enough for most people.

 

[informale]

Oh, come on people, even 196 is plenty - you're not going to do rocket science on your N1! Some people hardly manage to get 30 Mb on devices that costed about the same as Nexus half a year ago.

 

[sooper_droid12]

That's not the point buddy. If Android wants developers to develop applications/games that take advantage of the hardware, then it takes a lot more memory than 190mb. It's like buying a $2000 laptop with a top-of-the-line graphics processor, with a sick 19" wide-screen LED LCD, and using it to check your email and surf the web. Because if all I want to do is play Sudoku all day, then I don't need a Snapdragon chipset in my smartphone. If the extent of 3D applications is being able to tilt my photos back and forth, it seems like an awful waste of hardware.

More memory would allow game developers to make use of the hardware. There are some 3D applications available on the iPhone that wouldn't even be possible for the N1 at this time. For example, for $5.99, an iPhone user can get the Myst franchise playing on his iPhone. But at 720+mb with a 1gig space needed to download (the remainder returns after the download is complete), not even in N1's wildest dreams! The Avatar game is supposedly 1.5gig in size. For an iPhone user, this isn't a problem because that's less than 1% of their total storage capacity for apps. It's not even conceivable for Android until a native Apps2SD is released.

That's why 190mb is a poor excuse. Don't get me wrong, my DROID @ 230mb ain't any better than the N1. In the meantime, I guess we can have fun holding emulators over the heads of iPhone users while they get the best 3D apps/games available for smartphones.

 

[legendary1022]

I understand what you are saying sooper_droid12 but to me gaming on my phone is highly overrated. I mainly use my phone for productivity and multimedia (mainly podcasts and music). I've outgrown portable gaming with the exception of the occasional solitaire/freecell, tetris, wixel, etc. Those are good time-wasters when you need to kill a few minutes. I don't think I'll ever do any serious gaming on my phone (mainly because of battery conservation) and will stick to my PS3 and Xbox360 to handle my videogame needs.

I do see how it could be good for some, but an adult carrying around Gameboys, DS, or a PSP looks sad. To me there are only so many apps that you can download that increases your productivity before you download redundant apps (multiple Twitter apps for example). The added RAM will be nice and improve many people's needs. 3D games are good, just not for me

 

[sooper_droid12]

That may be great for you, but these Android phones aren't sold to only guys named Legendary1022. But let me put it another way: The less the phone needs to put apps on ROM, the more space that can be dedicated to the OS. GOOG touts the Android as a "light" OS, but "light" means that it's light in aesthetics, light on options, even light on things it should be doing more of, like utilizing the GPU.

And it isn't even that, Apple's size limit on applications is 2gigs and developers are whining that they don't like it, but at least it's sizable. Can you imagine what devs are saying about 190mb TOTAL?! The quality of apps could be so much better if devs had more space. I mean right now, I got Swype on my phone that's taking up 9mb and I'm thinking, "Whoa, that's already 3% of my storage space!" And that's just the beta version!

If I want apps that are as well executed as Swype or better, the phone needs more space. If I want a sweet home replacement, like well... Sweeter Home, the second preview of that app was almost 1.5mb and that's pre-, pre-beta! At 5-9mb per quality app, you're looking at an app folder of about 20-40 apps! That's it! You talk about productivity, what about a full office suite? I'd love that! But unfortunately, we have these truncated "quick office" suites.

But at the end of the day, people are going to want gaming on their phone, which is why Palm made a CONSCIOUS effort to recruit gamer developers to the Pre+/Pixi+. Why? Why for Palm? Because they know that's a user segment.

 

[informale]

I though we were talking about RAM, lol ) [Which is the name of the topic!]

And you guys are discussing the user space allocated in flash memory...

 

[sooper_droid12]

It got mixed up in there. Both RAM and ROM numbers available to the user are lower than advertised.

 

[informale]

The size of the system (be it Android or WM or anything else) is usually referred to as ROM size.
The total size of the storage memory and/or the "user space in that memory less ROM" may be refereed to as RAM, but because I'm more used to PC terminology I consider this misleading, so I though you were discussing the actual RAM, the SDRAM, not the flash memory. I don't know how else to explain )

 

[sooper_droid12]

N1 is advertised as having 512mb of ROM used for storing the OS and other critical things. What is left over from that is ROM available for the user to store apps. At current, only 190-ish mb of ROM is available for app storage. On the other end of the discussion is RAM of which N1 has 512mb. Of that RAM (the reports vary), there is somewhere in the neighborhood of ~200mb available for running apps. For the most part, this is fine, because Android apps don't really need that much RAM and it's better to have used RAM than RAM just sitting around unused. RAM can sometimes be tied up by the OS upon start-up and never relinquished. In the case of the N1, it appears that a version of the kernel has a bug that's holding onto 100-150mb that could otherwise be free for running apps or processes.

 

[James Bell]

@Sooper_droid12:
Can you give us a link to that Google tech's post? I'd like to read the details.

 

[KoukiFC3S]

I hope the nexus will get the missing RAM back.

On my Droid, I only have 30MB of ram free with all the apps I have running in the background. This includes weather, widgets, rss, locale, phonelogger, coupons, package tracking etc.

 

[sooper_droid12]

@Sooper_droid12:
Can you give us a link to that Google tech's post? I'd like to read the details.

Here's the post in xda:
100MB-150MB ramhack - xda-developers

I hope the nexus will get the missing RAM back.

On my Droid, I only have 30MB of ram free with all the apps I have running in the background. This includes weather, widgets, rss, locale, phonelogger, coupons, package tracking etc.

You don't want "free RAM" just sitting around. Hopefully, you want it utilized.

 

[booser4]

Is this a natural thing to happen on any new phone that is released? Like way underpowered compared to the specs it boasts having.

I mean if this is just business as usual for any phone and it all ends up getting fixed, that's one thing, but if this is unusual then I'm surprised people aren't up in arms about this and putting Google through hell until they fix it asap.

Just curious about this, because I knew about the whole 190mb storage thing, but I just always assumed the OS took up the other space and this was normal kind of....

 

[Astronomer]

For example, for $5.99, an iPhone user can get the Myst franchise playing on his iPhone. But at 720+mb with a 1gig space needed to download (the remainder returns after the download is complete), not even in N1's wildest dreams!

I call FUD. This isn't even remotely true. Android app space is divided up into executable binaries and data, and only the executable binaries -- which tend to be quite small -- can't be stored in the SD card. Everything else that comprises and app, however, like all the amazing graphics in Myst which take up all the space, get put in the SD card. If Myst ever gets ported to Android (and I'm not saying it will), it will store and run just fine on an Android device.

 

[Wotan]

N1 is advertised as having 512mb of ROM used for storing the OS and other critical things. What is left over from that is ROM available for the user to store apps. At current, only 190-ish mb of ROM is available for app storage.

OK, you lost me there. ROM = Read Only Memory, burned in once at the factory, READ ONLY, never to be written to again. So how can ANY ROM, anywhere, be "available" for user storage?

EDIT: I'm thinking it's actually an EEPROM, not a ROM?

 

[cyberbob25]

OK, you lost me there. ROM = Read Only Memory, burned in once at the factory, READ ONLY, never to be written to again. So how can ANY ROM, anywhere, be "available" for user storage?

EDIT: I'm thinking it's actually an EEPROM, not a ROM?

He refers to the flash memory (non-volatile) versus the volatile RAM. It does seem, however innaccurate, that the term ROM is used quite frequently in this market.

 

[hondamx525]

RAM is being used to keep the system running. It is not "under spec'd." About half the ram is used to keep the android OS running, the rest is for apps. The iphone has less than 512 megs of RAM so whoever is arguing the game thing is crazy.

 

[lobug]

RAM is being used to keep the system running. It is not "under spec'd." About half the ram is used to keep the android OS running, the rest is for apps. The iphone has less than 512 megs of RAM so whoever is arguing the game thing is crazy.

This isn't true. For one android does not require 256 mb of ram to operate

If this was the case then my friends Motorola droid that only 288MB or Ram would have nothing left...also note he is on android 2.1, and my Archos 5 android also has 256 and that is on it that had Android 1.6 and that has 115 free ...and no im not getting ROM confused with RAM i think you might be though

You can download a program called AIsystem widget and it shows your total physical ram my Nexus only shows Total amount of 211MB with 110MB free.

Also a Google employee even said that the 2.1 kernel is flawed and android is only seeing half RAM/ROM.

 

[oniongirl]

I think you're all getting confused.

ROM is not mentioned in the phone specs (unless I missed it somewhere) - ROM (ie Read-Only Memory) is normally where the firmware is held, for example, on a desktop PC it would hold the BIOS. It does mention 512MB Flash, which means storage space for apps and the like; in this instance it probably includes the space used to store the OS, as well as space to download to. This is basically the phone's hard drive.

RAM is Random Access Memory. That's where programs store their information for quick retrieval whilst running. So lots = better ability to run multiple simultaneous programs. The more programs running, the less RAM available, although from what I've heard, Android does a reasonable job of managing the running apps so that when something that has been inactive for a while (ie. hasn't accessed any of its info in the RAM for a while) and available RAM is low, it'll do a little clear up. Which is unlikely to happen - my old laptop that I loved dearly and refused to let die was running with 512MB of RAM up until last year when the amount of flash content on sites became too much for it and it used to spaz up from overheating due to swapping in/out info from RAM.

So, yeh, RAM is the important bit here and will determine performance, 'ROM' (as you are all calling it, but really you mean the flash-based drive) is expandable with microSD.

Anyway. None of this will explain anything if the OS isn't correctly reporting the amount free. Or perhaps the OS is poorly written and so its info is taking up a lot more of the RAM than intended, hence reporting low values for RAM.

 

[Nexus1]

That's not the point buddy. If Android wants developers to develop applications/games that take advantage of the hardware, then it takes a lot more memory than 190mb. It's like buying a $2000 laptop with a top-of-the-line graphics processor, with a sick 19" wide-screen LED LCD, and using it to check your email and surf the web. Because if all I want to do is play Sudoku all day, then I don't need a Snapdragon chipset in my smartphone. If the extent of 3D applications is being able to tilt my photos back and forth, it seems like an awful waste of hardware.

More memory would allow game developers to make use of the hardware. There are some 3D applications available on the iPhone that wouldn't even be possible for the N1 at this time. For example, for $5.99, an iPhone user can get the Myst franchise playing on his iPhone. But at 720+mb with a 1gig space needed to download (the remainder returns after the download is complete), not even in N1's wildest dreams! The Avatar game is supposedly 1.5gig in size. For an iPhone user, this isn't a problem because that's less than 1% of their total storage capacity for apps. It's not even conceivable for Android until a native Apps2SD is released.

That's why 190mb is a poor excuse. Don't get me wrong, my DROID @ 230mb ain't any better than the N1. In the meantime, I guess we can have fun holding emulators over the heads of iPhone users while they get the best 3D apps/games available for smartphones.

So if your so in to the iphone and bragging about it then why are you even on this thread? Better yet why are you even on this website?

 

[lobug]

oniongirl the Nexus One has 512MB FlashROM and 512MB RAM

HTC - Products - Nexus One - Specification


OK i got proof for the naysayers

The RAM is missing and its already been somewhat resolved with Cyanogen 5.0 MOD it has the latest 2.6.32 kernel and Nexus one now reports 395MB RAM instead of 211MB total. Yea its still not all the 512 but its better than 211

[ROM] CyanogenMod 5.0 for Nexus One (EXPERIMENTAL) [01/28/2010 / 5.0-beta3] - Page 44 - xda-developers


So yea ill say it again the kernel is flawed and will be fixed in next update and if you cant wait ..then unlock root and install CyanogenMOD just a note though it has problems so id recommend just waiting for official update

 

[AnotherFatalEpic]

So if your so in to the iphone and bragging about it then why are you even on this thread? Better yet why are you even on this website?

Wow, you missed it more than Michael Bay missed the mark, when he made Pearl Harbor.