Originally Posted by
BlackZeppelin BUT after my S5 is running real world RAM of less than 500 MB
Remember, no matter how much RAM there is in the phone, Android likes to keep it filled up. 500MB free is good, it's making proper use of the space.
If you're ordering an 8GB phone to see more free RAM, you won't if it works properly. Maybe a little more - maybe 800MB free. Maybe even 1GB free, but that's about it.
Remember, this isn't Windows, a system that likes as much free RAM as possible. Android doesn't take the time to swap apps in and out of RAM when it runs short, it just kills apps. Android apps have to always keep their current state saved, so when an app gets killed, then gets called back later in a "run from where you were" state, it takes milliseconds to bring it back. If that happens in Windows, the whole machine can freeze while it's swapping stuff around. (See
Multitasking the Android Way if you're interested in a technical explanation by one of the people who actually designed Android.)
You can't run more than 2 foreground apps at once and no app gets close to using 4GB of RAM, so 8GB is futureproofing for about 4 or 5 years, it's not something you need now. An app in the background can be sitting in RAM or it can get killed and you'd never notice the difference. And that's as it should be.
(I do have to admit that the pen is nice - even from using my Note 3, I've gotten spoiled. I have a few stylii for my Pixel now. Screenshots are easy with Pie, so I don't need that, and I've never had all the new stuff, but just writing, typing or selecting is easier with a pen.)