Hey, can we go back to legit flip phones and not this stupid tri-fold gimmick they keep trying to push around like AI?
I actually like the form factor of the folds. I want them to get better.
I have a Galaxy Fold 7 , just one fold, one half back screen and it is so much better than these huge screen phones that don’t fit anywhere. It runs fast, long battery life no issues except few apps work on the back screen for now.
Apple should invent it around 2027.
Just about the only recent development that seems innovative in any way instead of just “ooooh many megapixels” or “oooohhh so thin!”
I can’t recall who it was, either LG or Samsung, but I remember a device that had a screen that pulled/rolled out to become tablet size. I so wanted them to iterate on that idea.
Ooooh I remember that, It was the LG Rollable!
Unfortunately LG’s Mobile division went kaput. I have no idea if they sold off parts of it or the tech to anyone…You’re the MVP! I’m sorry, but how fucking cool was that?!
it looked cool but people found it practically difficult to use, the mechanism used a lot of power and was fragile.
Didn’t fold’s suck at first too?
Thanks for the info BTW. I hadn’t followed the development, so the insight is appreciated.
this stupid tri-fold gimmick
Just like Apple. It’s a new “shiny” gimmick that will lose it’s luster. Makes no sense to me.
Dont worry, Samsung will now use 8gb
Oh no! Anyway…
“shortage”
Free-market apologists/cultists will be ready with a lot of excuses for this one.
An caps have always been out of touch
Isn’t that exactly what the article is? Rather than slash profits a little until prices return to normal, they’re trying to justify lowering specs while acting like the victims.
Fair enough
PC game emulation is the only thing I care for in high end phones. For that 16+GB is good. Sucks that we’re going backwards in consumer electronics affordability
Expectation: Shift toward leaner apps/app building frameworks, more user control about background process management
Likely reality: Background app killing becomes even more aggressive, multitasking (somehow) sucks even harder lmaoooooo
I do find it a bit odd that my phone has 12gb of memory which is a shitload. Maybe refine software?
Why should we, the developers, invest money into refining software when we can just get you, the users, to invest in more hardware?
Why not both?
Because more hardware means sell for more money
Yeah, that’s one half of both.
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Ah, a fellow veteran
Not to forget the vibe coding stupidity.
6 GB RAM phone user here. What are you all doing with that RAM on your phones?!
My phone idles at 6.8 for some ungodly reason.
8.3gb idle here. Im pretty sure Im a part of aws without knowing it.
I just closed everything and got the below.
7.4 GB with all apps closed and no data connections. Closing all background apps gets to 6.2MB. Makes Windows look efficient.
That’s because empty RAM is wasted RAM.
You want to keep RAM full of stuff you aren’t using right now. That stuff can be erased almost instantly if you need the RAM for something else. That’s why OSs list “Available RAM” and “Free RAM” as two separate things.
Removing all the idle apps from RAM just means you need to wait longer every time you open one of them.
Yes, this is true, and I have preached this in the past, but…
They’re not treating it as a cache. Most of these apps don’t function with less ram.
It’s just inefficiencies stacked on inefficiencies. And yeah, they didn’t matter a ton at first, because our hardware was advancing fast enough to handle it. But at some point we should really go back and visit a lot of this stuff.
A 2014 computer should have gotten better at all the basic tasks that existed then, not worse.
The Windows 11 start menu being built on React is a good example. Insanity.
Being spied on by the US, China, Russia and the rest of the five eyes alliance.
4GB here, recently I wanted to try out a local AI and was informed by the popup that 6GB is the bare minimum.
So, it won’t be until my next upgrade that I can travel abroad and have image translation on my FOSS phone.
What app did you try?
I can’t find it now, something from Github. The file name in downloads is TranslateOCD.apk (not my typo) and TranslateOCRapp is the app title in package installer.
I just checked mine, 6gb here too. It’s probably been a month since my last restart. Only using 4.2gb. I have no idea what I would do with more.
You’d have to rewrite about 17 years worth of Android software for that. They chose a garbage collector based programming language/VM, can’t replace that with something more efficient without basically rewriting all software. Looks like Apple made the right choice here by going with a reference counting scheme.
I mean, Android isn’t just Java, and iOS has plenty of bloat. They both run gnarly cross-platform frameworks.
A bigger factor is probably their approach. iOS started life as “one app runs at a time” and gradually grew sleeping and background jobs as features. Android (mostly) allowed apps to do pretty much anything in the background, and only recently started cracking down on the worst abuses.
Play Store uses 150MB doing nothing.
Eh, I’m afraid its doing more than nothing. Same with basically every giant app that sits in the background.
They’re datamining the snot out of you. With the ostensible excuse of “analytics” and being able to send notifications.
Doing nothing for me.
When using garbage collection there is a trade-off between memory usage and performance. If you run the garbage collector a lot, memory usage is low but performance is crap (because it’s spending a lot of CPU cycles on the GC), if you rarely run it the performance is good but memory usage goes up by a lot (because memory isn’t released often enough). You have to pick a point between those two extremes.
Turns out that if you want to have similar performance as a non-GC language you use about 3 times as much RAM compared to the non-GC language.
Turns out that if you want to have similar performance as a non-GC language you use about 3 times as much RAM compared to the non-GC language.
How does this work with respect to your previous comparison with iOS now that the iPhone 17 comes with 8GB RAM? Are you implying that no Android phones will reach performance parity with iPhones until they start shipping with 24GB RAM?
No, it’s not as simple as that. A large part of Android is written in C++ and not Java or Kotlin. Think of things like the web browser. Also things like more demanding games will be written in C++ so they won’t be affected by this at all.
It’s mostly the simpler Java/Kotlin based apps, which will be a majority of the apps on the Play Store. They don’t necessarily need the performance, but they will be more wasteful with memory than comparable iOS apps.
Phones are being pushed to have full 3D game experiences. For example: running new resident evil games or Death Stranding. These things need that memory. It’s unified memory, so it’s RAM and VRAM all in one.
It also enables multitasking. And if you are on Android, you are running Chrome, right? Notorious RAM eater.
I don’t have games on my phone and I use duckduckgo. Every phone I’ve ever had has been at 60% memory usage idle.
