How would the extra 1 gig of Ram effect the S3

[Sailindawg]

I find the conversations regarding more RAM in a phone similar to the conversations regarding running more RAM in a desk top pc. More sys RAM will help the phone load apps more quickly & appear snappier. From what I've read, ICS is very good at multitasking. Phones these days are mini pc's. My IP4 is more powerful than my first desktop. As phones become more pc like, the phone's hardware specs will be parallel to a pc. What we are seeing with the HOX, is a purposefully gimped memory software management approach to solve a hardware problem. The hardware problem is not enough sys RAM to handle a heavily tasked phone. The problem has its roots in the fact that in the US / Japan, quad cores don't work well with LTE radios. The quad core SOC have dedicated memory for the graphics chip. The dual core SOC do not & depend upon sys RAM. Samsung seems to have realized this & built their phone with appropriate hardware to give the user a very good experience that would be similar to pc performance.

It's been interesting to watch the evolution of the smartphone from the early days of Palm Pilots and Compaq IPAQ's. Hardware wise, phones are starting to come full circle to pc's as people use the phone's as an extension of their desktop pc. I almost expect phone's to start to replace laptops as phone become more sophisticated with future hardware & software improvements.

More sys RAM is a good thing!

 

[mjserrata]

Thanks for the comments guys

 

[biff6789]

Some European S3 owners over on XDA are reporting launcher redraws on their phones (which, remember, only have 1 gig of RAM).

Perhaps Samsung decided to throw US users a bone and bump of the RAM to offset the fact that we don't get a quad core chip since no quad core chips were ready to work with LTE yet (that's coming to the US later this year), or perhaps they've discovered a flaw in their earlier European designs and found that they needed to increase the RAM to provide a better user experience.

Either way, 2 gigs of RAM was "win" written all over it

 

[CypherMax]

I hateit when the launcher redraws! Does it all the time on my Droid x. There should be no excuse with 2 gigs. I plan on running nova on my GS3 I just hope it stays in memory.

Sent from my Xoom using Android Central Forums

 

[iN8ter]

First-more RAM means more programs running in the background only if you choose to run more programs in the background.

What's the effect? Basically you'll have more free RAM, which means greater ability to run a large number of apps without them needing to be closed.

No. The system will still cache a ton of background processes before you even open them, the same way Windows does, and the same way most all other UNIX-based OSes do. Free RAM is wasted RAM, and not using much of it as a cache actually makes performance worse.

The extra RAM will boost performance, but not necessarily because you will have more FREE RAM, but because it will have much of the app data that you'll access pretty much ever (unless you install a ton of apps/games) already cached when you go to launch them.

Loading from a RAM Cache is faster than loading from Storage, therefore performance benefits.

And of course if you run very large applications, there is an obvious benefit to the extra RAM. Also note that even 1GB devices have less than 1GB App-Accessible RAM since some RAM is reserved (GPU, etc.), so it's also good to know that you'll at least have more than the 1GB those other SKUs are advertised to have - app-accessible...