Downloading more RAM has been a long-standing joke in tech circles, but a new feature coming to a Samsung smartphone is the closest we’ll ever get to.
For those unfamiliar with the joke, Random Access Memory or RAM is a physical part of computers and cannot be downloaded. The joke is associated with those who are not tech savvy and is often used to mislead people on technology or gaming forums. Unfortunately downloading RAM has also become almost a scam with many online places and apps on the Play Store offering the ability to upgrade RAM.
Samsung, however, is rolling out a feature called ‘RAM Plus’ for the Galaxy A52s 5G. According to Sammobile (via Android Authority), RAM Plus allows users to reserve a portion of the phone’s internal storage to use as ‘RAM’.
This isn’t exactly a new feature, and it’s one offered by Android and other operating systems like Windows. Called paging in some systems, it is simply a way that an operating system uses a part of the storage drive as RAM. What sets Samsung’s RAM Plus feature apart is that it offers users an easy way to control the feature, which is not common on Android devices (Android Authority notes that Oppo has a similar feature).
While it’s certainly cool, it’s unclear how useful the feature will be in practice. RAM is usually much faster than memory used for storage, so there is likely to be a performance hit when accessing any information stored this way. That said, there may be benefits for devices with a small amount of RAM to begin with, even if the added RAM Plus isn’t as fast as actual RAM.
Of course, the Galaxy A52s offers 6GB of RAM out of the box, which is quite a lot and I have my doubts that people would benefit from increasing that via RAM Plus. Also, it is not clear if RAM Plus will be available on other Samsung devices; At the time of writing, it appears that the A52 was not available in Canada, but you could get the very similar Galaxy A52 5G.
Source: Sammobile Via: Android Authority