Buying a smartphone today can be confusing. Long specs sheets are crammed with numbers, and their relationship with real-world performance is not always clear. One of the most misunderstood of all those specs is RAM, or Random Access Memory.

If you’re wondering how much RAM your smartphone needs, then you’re not alone. This question has popped up again and again since the dawn of the smartphone.

How the RAM work

We install apps and games into internal storage, our CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) deal with processing, so what does RAM do?

”When you run an app or game on your phone, it’s loaded into RAM. As long as an app is still in RAM, you can jump back into it where you left off without loading it afresh. This is why RAM is important for multitasking. The loaded apps stay there until your RAM fills up and needs to flush something to make room for something else.

In theory, more RAM means that you can have more processes and therefore more apps running at once.

RAM also enables processes to run in the background. Some of these background processes, such as your phone checking for email, are really useful. Others, like a piece of carrier bloatware or an app that you never use, are not.

“Generally speaking, more RAM is better, and performance isn’t hampered by having more RAM,”

“But is it really necessary?”

Why having more RAM isn’t always better

If RAM offers potential performance improvements and greater convenience, then you may be wondering: what’s wrong with having more of it?

“The more RAM you put into a phone, the more power that will draw and the shorter your battery life will be”.

 “RAM takes up the same amount of power regardless of what’s in it — if it’s an application or it’s just free, you’re still paying for it in terms of POWER.”

In other words, if you aren’t using the RAM, then it may be an unnecessary drain on your battery. Those background processes that we mentioned earlier also have an associated cost, as anyone who has used the Facebook app on Android will know.

Even if they’re not doing much, they can cause the processor to spin up to service any work that they have to do and that can contribute to energy drain.

Free the RAM

“Users have been conditioned to believe that free RAM is an indicator of good performance from the days of PCs with limited memory, where this was a reasonable belief,” 

“Nowadays, with more memory available, the perception that free RAM is an indicator of performance is a misconception. In fact, for a smartphone it’s the opposite.”

This misconception that having free RAM is a positive thing persists. Also, if you’re in the habit of clearing away your open apps, you should probably stop doing it because it isn’t helping.

It won’t save battery life or make your phone run any faster, in fact, it can have the opposite effect.

“The operation of loading an app from storage into memory requires a lot of processing power, which results in higher power consumption,”

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Ultimately, how much RAM your smartphone needs depends on how you use your smartphone, but it’s no longer the problem it once was.

Maybe a few power users will be able to feel the benefit of 6GB, and you might argue that 8GB is future-proofing. But anything over 4GB is probably overkill for the vast majority of people today.

Credits: Simon Hill of digitaltrends.com

While more ram is necessary , it's important to know that the ram has to be backed with a good processor.. A SD636 or Helio p60 with 3gig ram will outperform a Helio p22 with 20gigs of ram

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