Its been a hobby of mine to browse for smartphones and compare specs and found that most "wars" on the best smartphones, like Apple's IPhone5 or Samsung's Galaxy S4 rival on specs like weight, size, processing speed of the CPU, but found little improvement on RAM. The Samsung Galaxy S4 has 2GB of RAM while Apple's IPhone5 has 1GB of RAM. I even seen China clones/phones having a quadcore CPU but only 256MB or 512MB of RAM. My questions are: 1.) Is it important for a phone to have a less/higher amount of RAM? 2.) Why do phone makers mostly get cheap on the Amount of RAM they put on, like my example of having a quadcore CPU but only 256MB/512MB of RAM?
reduces manufacturing costs. Phones are usually based on 'system on a chip' (SoC) technology, which basically means the CPU and RAM, and sometimes GPU as well, are all integrated into a single integrated circuit package. This gives manufacturers less choice of components because they're aiming for a specific manufacture cost per unit, so they cut back somewhere. Some companies, like Samsung, produce their own SoC packages, which gives them more freedom when it comes to choosing specifications
Okay so there are a few different issues to cover here. First of all we have to separate out the Chinese market entirely, the logic there does not work for other brands. So the reason for why RAM is not really a marketable spec is that it's not very tangible. When it comes to the feel and smoothness of the UI the CPU and GPU matters much more than the RAM. The RAM is basically only there to allow the OS to keep multiple programs open for faster switching. Until somewhat recently multitasking wasn't even possible in iOS or Android. So knowing this it all comes down to space. RAM takes up space and space is the one thing you do not have in smartphones. Camera, CPU, antennas, battery etc are simply much better at selling than the amount of RAM in a phone. Basically the amount of RAM in a phone is what is deemed required to run optimally and no more. iOS is highly optimized so 1 GB of RAM is usually enough, Android is a bit less optimized so 2 GB of RAM is used to make sure it will always be smooth. I personally don't think we will see any big RAM increases for a while as the space is much better used for higher storage or bigger battery. So the second issue is the Chinese phones. I am a bit biased here as I work for OPPO and as such many of the Chinese phones are technically our competitors. That said, the reason here is basically that most Chinese brands do not give a shit about anything outside the Chinese market and inside China you compete on price. For example, take the latest Xiaomi phone Hongmi which costs a mere $130 and sold more than 7.5 million phones in the first day it was launched. The premium phone market inside China is small compared to the budget phone market and that's why you see Chinese companies cutting back costs on something like RAM. On the flip side, if you take a company like OPPO which produces the Find 5 and is actively pushing into international markets then you will see it also comes with 2 GB RAM (and a higher price) as it aims to be a premium phone with good performance.
Ah, very informative! Thank you for those information, i learned a lot. If i may add another question, about the card slot for an external micro sd card, does that also covered by the "space issue" or is that just marketing strategy? Like the 8/16/32/64GB? Also, how come Samsung Galaxy S4 can afford to place it while others can't and still samsung is by far cheaper? Like the OPPO Find 5 for example.
Not really sure what design decisions went into the external micro sd slot for the Find 5, but considering it's weighing in at 165 grams already I'd guess the weight has something to do with it. The cost of adding it is almost nothing. Costs come from 3 major areas. 1) The display 2) The CPU/GPU 3) Licensing fees.
