Are you happy about the amount of RAM on the Galaxy S4?

RayMabry

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I have to say, I was hoping for a bit more RAM. I already have 2GB on my GS3 and while I can live with it, it is the one thing aside from the battery life that I was hoping would see a significant increase.

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zkSharks

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Android's memory management is efficient and effective. Even running as many apps as you can, things will be shuffled around and brought in and out of RAM to ensure as close to a seamless experience as possible. For now, anything over 2GB won't be a substantial improvement. It'll be a while before applications and mobile device usage habits catch up to that amount of RAM, with the exception of some of the most demanding games perhaps.
 

MikeLip

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It's too much. 640k is enough for anyone. :p Someone had to say it.

The only use for more than 2Gig would be to speed up massive task switching. But who in their right mind would switch between enough tasks to use up that much RAM? It's a phone, not a tower. Yeah, 2gig is good.
 

So Cold

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2GB on the S3 is more than enough.. It will be also more than enough on the S4 for sure.

Well coming from a sense phone that struggled with only 1 gig of ram I fully appreciate and notice 2 gigs. I agree right now anything over 2 is overkill because it will never get used, but I would never go to nothing with less than 2

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Kerafyrm

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I have to say, I was hoping for a bit more RAM. I already have 2GB on my GS3 and while I can live with it, it is the one thing aside from the battery life that I was hoping would see a significant increase.

I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, but the Galaxy S3's RAM (and the HTC One's RAM) is LPDDR2, while the Galaxy S4's RAM is LPDDR3 (higher memory bandwidth, better power efficiency).

It was briefly stated back during the cheesy Galaxy S4 unveiling by the "clarification" guy.
 

RayMabry

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I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, but the Galaxy S3's RAM (and the HTC One's RAM) is LPDDR2, while the Galaxy S4's RAM is LPDDR3 (higher memory bandwidth, better power efficiency).

It was briefly stated back during the cheesy Galaxy S4 unveiling by the "clarification" guy.

Well that sounds interesting. My memory seems to always be pushing the limit on this phone and when it gets to that point things start acting weird. So any improvement is a welcome one. Thanks for the info.

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Aquila

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I had an old alienware machine that I loved, it came with, 9GB RAM which I quickly upgraded to 18, back when PC's shipped with 4 on high end devices. When I got into statistical analysis, I was shocked to discover that some of the programs and workbooks I was creating in programs like SAS, Excel and Access would take literally hours to calculate or compute data... the obvious answer, more RAM!!!! My MOBO supported 64GB, so it got 64.

The result: None of those programs saw any improvement AND other programs started lagging. The overkill was too much for it and despite having two quad core processors (a big deal at that time), my guess is that approximately 60GB of the RAM was wasted. Why? Because these programs are hardwired to only use a limited amount of RAM (Excel is 2GB, not sure of the others exactly, the forums disagree) and the only thing that speeds things up is on the user end, pacing calculations deliberately via base programming, VBA, etc... as you can guess, both of those things barely improve the speed.

Since most Android games and apps are designed to work on single and dual core devices with .5 to 1GB RAM... having 2 GB on a quad core is definitely overkill (for now) and I imagine it'll be 2-3 years before apps (other than hardcore games) begin to catch up with the need for those specs, and 2-3 years beyond that before a significant number of apps "require" that kind of power. I'm sorry to say this, but I'd guess that if you're experiencing visual lag, that's either software or inefficient processing/process switching, not the power behind it.
 

RayMabry

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Well, I dunno what it is but I'd like it to stop. I also had this issue twice where I couldn't open photos in my gallery and it was warning me about memory. My phone has actually been behaving recently (for the most part) even though I've been working it harder. Eh who knows?

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Almeuit

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Well, I dunno what it is but I'd like it to stop. I also had this issue twice where I couldn't open photos in my gallery and it was warning me about memory. My phone has actually been behaving recently (for the most part) even though I've been working it harder. Eh who knows?

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Do you close apps? I keep some open but if I know I am not going to mess with the phone I close all open apps.

Sent from my Sprint S3 using AC forums.