A year or so back, the big questions was, ‘do I need 1GB RAM?’ Most China phones came with 512MB, and only the more expensive China phones came with 1GB. Fast forward one year, and most main stream China phones are coming with 1GB and pushing on to 2GB.
So often now, we hear ‘do I need 2GB?’. The quick and dirty answer for the average user is ‘no’. Obviously it can’t hurt to have 2GB, but the fact is that most people won’t notice a difference.
So what exactly IS the difference? The main NOTICEABLE difference is that with 1GB, apps you’re not using while multitasking will be more likely to fall out of memory, and you’ll have to wait a second or two for it to reload. Depending on the situation, this could be a slight headache.
I’ll give a couple examples so you can get the idea. Imagine you’re in the middle of a long post on a forum in your browser, and a chat comes through that you need to answer. You switch over to the chat, then make a phone call, open your dictionary to look up a word, go to take a leak and come back to your browser to finish up the post. Ahhh! It’s gone. Shit. So now you need to start over again. That may not have happened if you had 2GB.
It’s important to remember, if you had answered the chat and gone directly back to the browser, most likely this wouldn’t have happened. But doing several things in between MAY push the current tab out of memory. It only takes a couple seconds to reload, but likely you will have lost the post you were in the middle of making.
Another example, you’re in the middle of a difficult level in Nova 3 or other larger memory hungry game, and a chat comes through. You switch over to chat and come back to your game. Ahhh! Shit, the game is rebooting and you need to restart at your last save. Once again, this is something that may not have happened if you had 2GB.
What’s happening is when Android runs low on memory, Android will push apps out that are of lower importance. The importance is dictated by the type of service said app falls under.
To sum it up, generally having 1GB is not an issue. I’m a bit of a power user myself. I’m often switching back and forth between Line, YouTube, Chrome, Cool Reader, but have very rarely found 1GB to be a hindrance.
However, if you are someone that is making a lot of posts through your phone while busy with chats and multitasking, or you’re switching through many apps and don’t have a second to spare, 2GB should be considered. It also should be remembered that even with 2GB, the situations mentioned above can still happen, it will just be less likely.
Leave a Reply