Thread: Xperia XA2 vs X
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Posts: 1,548 | Thanked: 7,510 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic
#25
Originally Posted by kinggo View Post
Do we really need 6GB RAM on the phone? I have a phone with 1.5 and a tablet with 4 and it's the same thing in most cases. Android doesn't do multitasking so the only noticeable difference is when starting something demanding and huge. But part of that also lies on way faster SOC on tablet and not just the fact that app is frozen in the background.
And for sailfish............ well, there's not enough app to fill that RAM anyway
It really depends. I would say that for "normal" smartphone usage in 2018 2-3 GB RAM should be enough, especially if applications are reasonably optimized (eq. drop non-critical resources when they loose focus, etc.).

On the other hand our phones are more or less notebooks a few years back performance wise, so it might make sense to use them the same way, either when fooling around as a developer/it enthusiast or when the phone no longer works as a mobile device but rather like a static one (say a device with smashed screen or bad battery acting as a lightweight server).

In such cases it could be RAM rather than the CPU or permanent storage acting as a bottleneck. For a few not-really-mobile-but-interesting use cases that might be RAM intensive:
  • emulation (old consoles, dosbox, wine, Android, etc.)
  • virtualization (at least some 64 bit ARM CPUs should have extensions for hardware assisted virtualization)
  • running containers & flatpacks (better app availability, running desktop apps)
  • compiling non trivial stuff on device
  • running advanced navigation and NLP algorithms on device (OSM Scout Server often hits memory limitations on Jolla 1 and other low RAM devices)
  • running local advanced speech recognition and speech synthesis (eq. not running potentially sensitive data through public cloud)
  • running some basic AI and machine learning tools & data analysis (as above & could be actually quite useful on mobile devices)
  • more RAM means more stuff can be cached from permanent storage, possibly leading to faster app startup and better responsiveness
  • running non optimized desktop apps (could be the only option for specialized apps)
  • running an absurd amount of apps at once (sadly, not all apps start fast and properly keep their state when re-started, so just keeping them running can be more convenient)

So even if it might seem absurd, I say more RAM can't hurt, as long as there are not critical downsides of that, such as very bad power consumption or all devices being too expensive due to excessive amount of RAM.
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